










Class_L_i_i 







































RICHARD ROBERTS 


The Spirit of God and 
the Faith of Today 






The Spirit 
of Qod and the 
Faith of 



by 

RICHARD ROBERTS 



Willett , Clark Coiby 

440 South Dearborn Street , Chicago 
200 Fifth Aoenue y New York 
*930 







Copyright ig$o by 
WILLETT, CLARK & COLBY 


Manufactured in The U. S. A. by The Plimpton Press 
Norwood, Mass.-LaPorte, Ind. 


APR 14 !W0 


©CIA 21832 





“ The Age of the Father,” said the mediaeval mystic, “ is 
past; the age of the Son is passing; the age of the Spirit 
is yet to be.” It would appear from many signs, as if the 
cryptic prophecy were on its way to fulfilment. 

E. F. Scott, in 
The Spirit in the New Testament 

The great mass of people were no more religious fift> 
years ago than they are now; but undoubtedly the few 
are less orthodox than they were then. On the other 
hand, I should say that the few are more religiously 
minded than they were in my youth. They are more 
speculative, they think more about first and last things; 
they are less content with the supposed certainties either 
of science or of religion. For them the one article in the 
creed which seems to gain a deeper and a fuller meaning 
as the others fade is, “ I believe in the Holy Ghost, the 
Lord and Giver of Life.” More and more, their mind 
dwells on the Master’s discourse with the Women of 
Samaria. They see the religion of the future as the reli¬ 
gion of the spirit — not merely something vague called 
the Life Force, but the “ Holy Spirit,” compelling us in 
spite of everything, to think of it as holy. 

J. A. Spender , in 
Lije, Journalism and Politics 











4 











CONTENTS 


Preface i 

Part I vs* Pentecost 5 

1. The Record 

2. The Company 

3. The Mind of the Company 

4. The First Consequences of Pentecost 

5. The Gift of Tongues 

6. The Gift of Power 

7. The Gift of Grace 

8. After Eighteen Years 

Part II ^ The Spirit at Large 47 

1. The Spirit of Emergence 

2. The Spirit of Discovery 

3. The Spirit of Ecstasy 

4. The Spirit of Revelation 

5. “ The Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth.” 

6. The Spirit of Moral Reinforcement 

7. The Spirit of Conversion 

8. The Spirit of Fellowship 

9. The Holy Spirit 

10. The Life of the Spirit 




CONTENTS 


Part III The Spirit in Relation to 
Thought and Practice 

1. The Spirit and God 

2. The Spirit and Man 

3. The Spirit and the Church 

4. The Church and the World 

5. The Conditions of Renewal 


PREFACE 


fhe Christian doctrine of the Holy Spirit 
sprang from the need of explaining cer¬ 
tain human experiences. Its origins are 
chiefly in the Old Testament, though it was pro¬ 
foundly affected in the course of its development 
by Hellenistic influences. Within the New Testa¬ 
ment period, it can hardly be said that the Judaic 
and Hellenistic elements were satisfactorily har¬ 
monized; and in certain respects, the doctrine 
of the Holy Spirit has in consequence always been 
something of a “ fifth wheel ” in the system of 
Christian theology. Not even the formulation 
of the Doctrine of the Trinity has enabled it to 
fit with comfort into the scheme of thought. 
But its survival in the religious mind proves that 
it corresponds to certain abiding features of re¬ 
ligious experience; and some attempt should be 
made to restate the doctrine for these days. This 
little work is nothing so ambitious as an essay in 
restatement. It is chiefly a brief survey of that 


j 




PREFACE 


part of the field of human experience which ap¬ 
pears to call for the doctrine and therefore for 
its restatement. 

The observance of the nineteen hundredth 
anniversary of Pentecost will do a very real serv¬ 
ice to the church of God and to the world by 
calling attention to this neglected field. There 
is little doubt that the churches of the Puritan 
and Evangelical traditions have allowed the con¬ 
ception of an active, personal Presence of God in 
the world to fall into relative obscurity. To be 
sure, they have consistently paid lip-service to 
it; but it has not been for a considerable time one 
of their controlling convictions. The evidence 
for this is to be found in the virtual disappear¬ 
ance of the festival of Pentecost from among 
their observances, especially on this side of the 
Atlantic. While the festivals of Christmas and 
Easter have been preserved, Pentecost, which in 
the tradition of the church is coequal with them 
in importance and sanctity, has fallen into desue¬ 
tude. If the celebration of its nineteenth cen¬ 
tenary does but restore the festival of Pentecost 
to its annual place in the life of these churches, 


2 


PREFACE 


it will have conferred an incalculable blessing 
upon them. 

But what we chiefly need is the abiding con¬ 
viction of a divine Presence which is active over 
the whole field of human life and whose office it is 
to accomplish “ the revealing of the sons of God.” 
This Presence is ever at hand to help our infirmi¬ 
ties, to reinforce our powers, to refine and sanc¬ 
tify our instincts, to aid our search for the good, 
the true and the beautiful, to kindle vision, and 
to bring us at last to the stature of the fullness of 
Christ. What I have tried to do in these pages is 
to show the evidence of a divine Presence in the 
world, the range of its operations, and the condi¬ 
tions (in so far as we can divine them) under 
which it works. If this admittedly somewhat 
slight and discursive treatment of so great a sub¬ 
ject assists even a little in recalling Christian folk 
to serious attention to this untilled portion of 
their spiritual estate, the writing of it will be 
more than justified. 

Richard Roberts 

Toronto 

February 28, 1930 

3 





PART I 


Pentecost 


































I 


The Record 

I n Christian tradition, the classical manifesta¬ 
tion of the Holy Spirit is associated with the 
events of the feast of Pentecost after 
the death of Jesus. It becomes our first busi¬ 
ness then to consider the experience which be¬ 
fell the primitive Christian community on that 
day. 

The record of the event is preserved in the 
early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles. The 
critical moment of the event occupies no more 
than the second chapter; but the event itself 
must be regarded as embracing all the experi¬ 
ences and happenings of the time which elapsed 
between the day of Pentecost itself and the mo¬ 
ment at which the high Christian tide made its 
first onset upon the Gentile world. All that oc¬ 
curred during that period must be traced to the 
astonishing and decisive experience in the Upper 
Room. 


7 



THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


It is doubtless true that by the time the record 
was put in writing, certain legendary additions 
had fastened themselves on the story. But there 
is little reason to suppose that the main features 
of the report are not a sufficiently reliable tran¬ 
script of the event. How St. Luke came by his 
information we do not know. It is not impossible 
that portions of the story were set down in writ¬ 
ing by eyewitnesses. But we may surmise that 
Luke, who was a careful historian, himself 
gathered most of his information from among 
those in Jerusalem and elsewhere who remem¬ 
bered the stirring happenings of the time. St. 
Luke, however, appears on the Christian scene 
rather late; and by that time the experience must 
have been to some extent distorted in the memo¬ 
ries of the survivors. 

A great experience does not at any time lend 
itself to a realistic account of itself. The emo¬ 
tional stress foreshortens vision and consequently 
gives an inaccurate picture; and the passing of 
the years tends to aggravate the original dispro¬ 
portion. But there is ground for believing that 
St. Luke gives us a restrained and conservative 
8 


PENTECOST 


impression of the episode; and the account which 
he gives may be regarded as preserving the 
mature apostolic interpretation of the great 
moment. 


2 

The Company 

Let us then go into the Upper Room and con¬ 
sider the company gathered there. Who are 
these people? They are very ordinary folk, not 
a superman among them, no one of outstanding 
intellect, no likely statesman. Even the eleven 
apostles, the inner circle, were so far men of no 
special distinction. Indeed, their story in the 
Gospels shows them to have been rather dull, 
slow in the uptake and laying a heavy tax upon 
the singular patience of Jesus. Evidently Jesus 
did not choose them for their cleverness, their 
public ability; yet Jesus did choose them, and 
he must have had good reasons for choosing them. 
We are not told what these reasons were; but 
we may at least divine one of the reasons. Jesus 
had said to them, “ Ye are they which continued 

P 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


with me in my trials.” They had staying power 
and had proved it. They might be stupid, but 
they had been faithful. Jesus knew that once 
they had seen the point, they would stick to it, 
and the story St. Luke has to tell is in great part 
the story of how these men stuck to the point. 
Jesus chose them for their moral qualities, not 
for their intellectual capacity, or for their public 
gifts. He was not looking for brilliancy but for 
steadfastness, for men for spade work, not men 
for fireworks. The moral qualities of the com¬ 
pany in the Upper Room is not without its im¬ 
portance for our inquiry. 

They had been through a great deal in the 
previous weeks. During a period which must at 
least have covered four hundred days, many of 
them had sat at the feet of Jesus; and no doubt 
all of them had seen much of him. Eleven of 
them had been with him virtually all the time. 
They had learned much from him, but most im¬ 
portant of all was it that they had learned to love 
him, and so to love him that they had given up 
old associations, old traditions, calling, and, in 
some cases, home ties in order to follow him. 


io 


PENTECOST 


Their whole life was bound up with him. He was 
their life, their sanctuary and their hope. Just 
what his intention and mission were they seem 
never to have quite clearly grasped; but they 
trusted him implicitly to lead them into some life 
of peace and harmony and freedom. 

Then, as the result of circumstances which 
they only partially comprehended, Jesus was ar¬ 
rested by the public authorities, tried before the 
courts and sentenced to death and crucified under 
circumstances of great indignity. The light of 
their life went out; their joy was turned to ashes; 
their hope darkened into despair. They were 
of all men most miserable. 

But three days later, there was a strange, 
swift reversal. From the depths of despair they 
were lifted up to the peak of exultation. At first, 
incredulous — the thing seemed too good to be 
true — then with dawning recognition, they real¬ 
ised that the Cross was not the end of the brief 
drama, but the end only of its first act. They 
found themselves in a transfigured world. For 
forty days, of which we have but scant record, 
they lived in this unexpected wonderland. 

ii 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


Then Jesus left them again. But this time 
the circumstances were very different. He was 
now not the fallen victim but the risen victor. 
They were conscious of no sorrow, no disappoint¬ 
ment or despair. For there had been given to 
them a promise, the nature of which they could 
not divine, but which was to be fulfilled not many 
days hence. 

Of the substantial reality of the experiences 
through which those people had passed I fail to 
see grounds for reasonable doubt. There are 
considerable miraculous elements in the story, 
to be sure, and in particular the Resurrection 
story. This is not the time or the place to dis¬ 
cuss the question. But despite the difficulties of 
the Resurrection narrative, it seems impossible 
to resist the conclusion that these people had 
experience of Jesus in personal presence 
after his death, however that experience is to be 
explained. 

In any case, it is well to remember that the 
only argument against the credibility of a miracle 
is that it never happened before, that there are 
no precedents for it. But in a world of life gov- 


72 


PENTECOST 


erned by a principle of evolution, and which is 
by that fact a world of unpredictable things, this 
objection has no real validity. Granted a unique 
concourse of circumstances, it would be rash to 
prophesy the event; and the presence of the per¬ 
sonality of Jesus would make any set of circum¬ 
stances unique. Be that as it may, the essential 
elements of the story — that Jesus was crucified 
and that after his crucifixion he moved again 
in sensible presence among his disciples and 
that he finally left them in a spirit of ex¬ 
pectation— must be accepted as in substance 
true. 

There is nothing that welds people together 
so soundly as a great common experience. Fel¬ 
lowship is born of great things seen together, 
done together, especially of great things suffered 
together. It was in the strength of such experi¬ 
ence that this company came and held together 
after the departure of Jesus. There was but one 
thing that tempered their confidence and their 
great hope — the uneasy sense of being beset 
behind and before by a hostile world. 


*3 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


3 

The Mind of the Company 

It is worth observing that from the beginning, 
the company felt that it had come to stay, for 
one of its earliest recorded transactions was an 
act of organization. Even though we may be 
constrained not to ascribe too heavy a weight of 
authority to the recorded commission to a world¬ 
wide ministry in Mark 16 and Acts i, it would be 
incredible that Jesus had not given them during 
his life with them a sense of wide and abiding vo¬ 
cation. That sense of vocation, and of such a 
vocation, they seem to have had; and as from its 
nature it was a vocation of propaganda, it was 
necessary to have a base. So they proceeded to 
organize themselves. At that point, it could not 
be a very serious or elaborate process. The cen¬ 
ter of the organization was naturally the inner 
circle of the twelve; and the first necessary step 
therefore was the filling of the place left empty 
by the defection and treason of Judas. 

But it is significant of the spiritual imma¬ 
turity of the company that they made their 
14 


PENTECOST 


choice by a method which was neither rational 
nor spiritual. They cast lots. Nowadays, we 
should have appointed a chairman, called for 
nominations, and proceeded to a ballot. But it 
does not follow that we should have done much 
better. The statistical method is no doubt more 
rational than the fortuitous. But it would be 
hard to prove that we ascertain the right course 
or make the proper choice by counting noses. 
The Society of Friends proceeds to its findings 
by a process which is called “ taking the sense of 
the meeting,” and there is no voting. It is a 
longer process and needs more patience than 
counting votes, but it is more consistent with a 
professed faith in spiritual guidance. And it is 
well to take time to make sure of the will of God. 

In the event, the choice made was without 
significance. The lot fell upon a respectable 
nonentity named Matthias, of whom we hear no 
more. It is an interesting and perhaps a not 
groundless conjecture that, in the divine provi¬ 
dence, the vacant place was later filled by a man 
named Paul. And if that be so, it gives us some 
measure of the tragedy of Judas. It was a con- 

*5 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


siderable place that he left to be filled. Be that 
as it may, it is evident that though the company 
in the Upper Room had a sense of important 
vocation, their naive trust in chance shows them 
to have been spiritually very immature. 

In addition to being conscious of a vocation, 
they were at the time in a mood of expectancy. 
This mood was not a vague Micawberishness, a 
waiting for something to turn up. It was ap¬ 
parently the expectation of empowerment for the 
task ahead of them; and they anticipated that 
the gift would not be long delayed. Naturally 
this mood would induce a certain intensity of pre¬ 
occupation with the coming experience. This is 
a point of much importance to our study; for in 
other spheres than the religious it has been 
definitely established that intense and purpose¬ 
ful mental concentration upon the subject in hand 
is a prerequisite of clear perception, of great 
illumination, of plain vision. 

It is also to be observed that this expectancy 
was not passive. It was dynamic and active. It 
discharged itself in prayer. These people were 
not merely waiting, they were seeking. They 
16 


PENTECOST 


not only stood at the door, but knocked and kept 
knocking until the door was opened. “ They all 
with one accord continued in prayer.” 

To sum up then: in the Upper Room was a 
company of people bound by a great common 
experience into a close-knit fellowship, sharing 
a sense of vocation, a common expectation and a 
life of prayer. 


4 

The First Consequences 
of Pentecost 

Then, one day, the great experience came. 
Of its inward nature we shall have to take such 
account as we may at a later point. For the 
present, we shall confine ourselves to its immedi¬ 
ate consequences. 

To begin with, there was a great accession of 
courage . After the Crucifixion, the disciples had 
gathered together behind closed doors for fear of 
the Jews. But now neither locks nor locksmiths 
could have kept them in. They were, after all, 
only a handful of inconsiderable folk, with no 

*7 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


very obvious capacity for a great work; and if 
they had been diffident and hesitating, who should 
blame them? But there was neither fear nor 
doubt in them as they swept the streets of Jeru¬ 
salem with an irresistible eloquence; and least of 
all in Peter whose dismal failure in another crisis 
might not have encouraged us to expect so flam¬ 
ing and fearless an atonement. But neither he 
nor his friends were afraid of anything that day. 

Then we observe that there was a unique 
power of utterance among them, so that a large 
number of those who heard them were pricked 
to the heart and accepted the gospel. Before this 
time, there is no evidence that any of the com¬ 
pany, even of the twelve, were unusually gifted 
in speech. Peter stood out among them in the 
Upper Room by virtue of a certain natural force 
which put him in a place of leadership. There 
is, however, no previous indication of his hav¬ 
ing possessed a gift of sustained and moving 
utterance. 

But on this occasion he proved himself ca¬ 
pable not merely of swaying opinion but of that 
more difficult and more important thing, of con- 
iS 


PENTECOST 


straining men to a verdict which they must regis¬ 
ter with their very lives. It is no little thing to 
exercise power in speech upon an individual; but 
on this occasion it seems to have produced de¬ 
cisive effect in a considerable number of people. 
This utterance must be distinguished carefully 
from the “ tongues ” to which allusion is made 
in the narrative. 

Further, it is evident from Peter’s speech on 
the day of Pentecost and in later utterances, that 
through this experience they had reached a clear 
perception of a gospel , involving a firm, even if 
partial, apprehension of what Jesus meant to 
the world. The whole impression that Jesus had 
made upon them, all that he had said to them, 
their direct experience of him, were fused into 
a coherent word; and with this word they went 
out to challenge the world. 

To be sure, there are grounds for doubting 
whether we have Peter’s very words in the re¬ 
corded Pentecost discourse. It is not likely that 
any one set it down in writing at the time. None 
the less, it is a somewhat gratuitous assumption 
that the discourse is an invention of St. Luke’s. 

19 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


It is more probable that he worked over some 
reminiscences that he had collected from among 
those who were present at the time and gave him 
the main drift of Peter’s discourse, perhaps giv¬ 
ing it a continuity and a finished form which it 
did not originally possess. It is inconceivable 
that St. Luke could have invented the very subtle 
and powerful argument of the Hellenist Stephen 
before the Sanhedrim, which possesses a char¬ 
acter all its own; and there is no reason to sup¬ 
pose that either the Pentecost discourse or any 
of the other major utterances in the early part of 
the Acts were any more products of St. Luke’s 
imagination than the speech of Stephen. 

In all these speeches there is a conspicuous 
similarity of intention. They all turn upon or 
lead up to the Crucifixion and the Resurrection; 
and the argument concludes in an appeal that 
men should accept this Jesus who was crucified 
as Christ and Lord. The Christian gospel was 
indeed not fully formulated until a greater and a 
no less consecrated mind brought its immense 
powers to the task. But the germs of it are here, 
and these germs were born in the experience of 


20 


PENTECOST 


the Upper Room. Thoughts and experiences, 
longings and emotions that lay about in their 
minds without order were focused upon a single 
point and took their proper place in a single intel¬ 
ligible testimony; and in a sense a new thing was 
born into the world. The Master who had been 
the light of their life they now saw to be the light 
of Israel and the light of the world. With a sure, 
clear insistence they proclaimed Jesus of Naza¬ 
reth to be the Christ of God and the Savior of 
men. 

There was still another result, though its im¬ 
plications were not clearly grasped at the mo¬ 
ment. They discovered themselves to be a 
church . We have observed their fellowship in 
the Upper Room; but at Pentecost there was such 
an enhancement of that fellowship as trans¬ 
figured it into a new thing. Before, they had a 
comradeship; now, they became a living unity. 
Of this new solidarity, one piece of evidence is 
decisive. So intensely conscious were they of 
this new community of spirit that they immedi¬ 
ately expressed it in a community of goods. 
“ They had all things in common.” As an eco- 


21 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


nomic experiment it failed; for presently they 
were scattered by persecution. It would prob¬ 
ably have failed in any case. To create an eco¬ 
nomic paradise within an economic chaos has 
always proved to be a forlorn hope. But here 
the failure is less significant than the attempt and 
what the attempt reveals — an absolute and com¬ 
plete identification of spirit and interest within 
the community of believers. The economics of 
the Upper Room are not important; but the im¬ 
pulse that underlay them is of the very essence 
of the church, though the church nowadays 
hardly encourages us to think that it is. 

These then, very summarily, were the more 
immediate consequences of Pentecost; an acces¬ 
sion of courage and power, the discovery of a 
gospel, the birth of a church. 

5 

The Gift of Tongues 

At some point or other, we should have to 
make a digression in order to consider a phe¬ 
nomenon which appeared for the first time in 


22 


PENTECOST 


Christian history at Pentecost and was frequent 
and widespread in the apostolic church, glosso- 
lalia , or the gift of tongues. It may be as well to 
discuss the matter here. In the Pentecost nar¬ 
rative the gift of tongues is usually identified 
with the circumstance that at Pentecost the 
members of a presumably polyglot multitude 
each heard the gospel in the tongue in which he 
was born. This identification is undoubtedly 
mistaken, for though the multitude in Jerusalem 
at the time was drawn from various regions, it 
was almost certainly not polyglot; and it is, fur¬ 
ther, more than likely that, with few exceptions, 
its members were familiar with the Greek lan¬ 
guage. The great majority was in all probability 
bilingual. The “ speaking with tongues ” at 
Pentecost must be identified with those ecstatic 
but unintelligible utterances which frequently 
accompany outbreaks of religious excitement. 
Their significance is psychological rather than 
religious. 

It is plain that glossolalia was regarded as 
an authentic manifestation of the Spirit; and 
those to whom the gift was given were under- 

23 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


stood to be privileged people. St. Paul was one 
of the gifted ones and regarded the gift with re¬ 
spect. He included it in a list of the workings 
of the Spirit along with the “ word of wisdom,” 
“ gifts of healings,” and “ prophecy.” But he 
quite definitely ranks it as lower in worth than 
the gift of “ prophecy,” which we may take to 
be inspired intelligible utterance. His reason 
for assigning an inferior place to the gift of 
“ tongues ” was the unintelligibility of the utter¬ 
ance and its consequent uselessness to the com¬ 
pany present. “ Unless ye utter by the tongue 
speech easy to be understood, how shall it be 
known what is spoken? for ye will be speaking 
into the air.” 

We may indeed trace here the beginnings of 
a scepticism on St. Paul’s part of the value of this 
ecstatic utterance. To the community, he says 
to his correspondents, it is without value except 
it be interpreted, and interpretation was another 
and a separate gift. In I Corinthians, he does 
not doubt the authenticity of the power as a gift 
of the Spirit; but he is clear as to its insufficiency. 
It is not enough to speak or pray or sing in the 
24 


PENTECOST 


Spirit; it is necessary to speak and to pray and 
to sing with the understanding also. And lest 
any man unduly exalt himself because he pos¬ 
sesses this or any other special gift, St. Paul re¬ 
minds the Corinthians of the “ more excellent 
way ” of love, without which none of these gifts 
avail anything. It is fair to infer that the 
tongues were becoming an embarrassment. 

However, it is safe to say that glossolalia 
was only a passing phenomenon. There is no 
reference to it in St. Paul’s later epistles, which 
would seem to indicate that it had disappeared 
from the normal life of the church. It is signifi¬ 
cant that St. Paul writing to the Ephesians, bids 
them “ be filled with the Spirit,” and expects in 
consequence only the sober ecstasies of “ speak¬ 
ing one to another in psalms and hymns and 
spiritual songs, singing and making melody with 
your heart unto the Lord, giving thanks always 
for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus 
Christ to God even the Father, subjecting your¬ 
selves one to another in fear of Christ.” The 
church had outgrown the phase in which tran¬ 
sient aberrations and extravagances were re- 

^5 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


garded as the marks of the spiritual life and 
had reached the normal plane of a rational 
spirituality. 

How glossolalia is to be explained can only 
be a matter of conjecture. E. F. Scott’s expla¬ 
nation is as plausible as any. A person may be 
so surcharged with religious excitement that he 
may not have the means of expressing it. In¬ 
deed, this is in its measure true not only of re¬ 
ligious but of any aesthetic excitement. There is 
more in the experience than any man can tell — 
it “ breaks through language and escapes.” But 
when an illiterate person — and it is to be re¬ 
membered that glossolalia, tarantism and the like 
occur by far most frequently among the illiterate 
— is overtaken by a religious exaltation beyond 
his capacity to tell, it must express itself in some 
fashion. It may take the form described in 
George Meredith’s poem, “ Jump to Glory Jane,” 
or it may pour itself out in sounds which have 
the semblance but not the substance of coherent 
speech. But in any case, it is doubtful whether 
it has any religious worth. “ A man is born both 
religious and rational; and the life which is not 
26 


PENTECOST 


both is neither.” This is not to deny that there 
are legitimate and authentic ecstasies in the re¬ 
ligious life; but these are known by their fruits. 

6 

The Gift of Power 

We may, I think, dwell longer with advantage 
on the case of Peter. The healing of the cripple 
in the Beautiful Gate of the Temple is no longer 
in the category of miracle. We know that lame 
and infirm people have been cured by suggestion. 
In modern practice, the patient is sometimes put 
into a hypnotic state because he is in that con¬ 
dition more susceptible to suggestion. But the 
hypnotic condition is not necessary, if the sug¬ 
gestion can be delivered with sufficient power. 
Jesus had the power, as in the case of the dumb 
child whose speech was released when he said to 
her, “ Ephphatha, be opened.” And face to face 
with the cripple, Peter had the power — Peter, 
this unlettered man from Galilee, who knew 
much about boats and nets and not much else; 
for at his word, the lame beggar, born palsied 

27 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


and forty years old, who had never walked, on 
the instant walks and leaps. 

The sequel of this incident was the arrest of 
Peter and John; and later in the story we find 
them being examined in private by the Temple 
authorities. It was an important and an impos¬ 
ing gathering, and Peter had spent the night in 
prison where he had had plenty of time to cool 
down. But he stands there, before the moguls of 
the Sanhedrim wholly unafraid and tells them the 
truth about themselves without hedging or mini¬ 
mizing. And this was Peter, who, only a few 
weeks before, in the precincts of the same place, 
had quailed before a girl’s accusing eye and had 
shamefully, violently denied his Lord. Surely 
hn astonishing transformation. 

This is typical of the entire episode. The 
word power is written over every page of the 
story. Here are ordinary men raised to a pitch 
so much above their ordinary selves that at their 
word a multitude is converted to their side. 
Weak men are transfigured into strong and fear¬ 
less leaders; and things happen at their touch 
and at their look that break through the ambit 
28 


PENTECOST 


of ordinary experience. It looks on the face of 
it as though a tide of some new and unknown 
quality of life had been released and were sweep¬ 
ing the scene on which we are looking. 

It is now established that we are all by nature 
possessed of powers and energies much greater 
than we usually suppose. The level at which we 
commonly live — whether of physical strength, 
or intellectual capacity, or of moral power — is 
much lower than that which is possible to us. 
Dr. Hadfield, an English neurological specialist, 
once asked three men to undergo a test of mental 
suggestion. He set them to grasp a dynamo¬ 
meter, first in their normal waking state; second, 
after suggesting to them under hypnosis that 
they were very weak; and third, after suggesting 
to them under the same conditions that they were 
very strong. These were the results: in their 
waking condition, their average grasp registered 
ioi pounds; under the hypnotic suggestion that 
they were very weak, the average was 29 pounds; 
under the hypnotic suggestion that they were 
very strong, the average was 142 pounds. 

Our physical strength would at any given 

2Q 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


moment appear to depend to a large extent upon 
our state of mind about it; and it is of course 
notorious that under unusual emotional stress we 
are able to perform feats of strength and endur¬ 
ance of which otherwise we should deem our¬ 
selves incapable. “ The limits of possibility in/ 
our daily lives,” says Dr. Hadfield, “ are defined 
less by the body than by the mind; and the re-' 
sources of power are psychical rather than phys¬ 
ical in character.” There seems to be little 
reason to suppose that what is true of our phys¬ 
ical grasp is not also true of our mental grasp and 
our moral grasp. A very large part of our 
natural human capital goes unused. But why? 

Here is the lame man in our story. He had 
been lame from his birth; and yet it is obviously 
true that there was really nothing the matter 
with his limbs, for he immediately leaps and 
walks. But he had been from infancy told that 
he was a lame weakling; and he had grown up 
believing it. That belief had in time become a 
complete inhibition. That is a good part of the 
trouble with most of us — these arbitrary checks 
and limits that our minds set upon our powers. 

3° 


PENTECOST 


Not long ago I had occasion to read some 
letters by and about a very remarkable woman. 
A young woman had been appointed by her to a 
certain task, from which she pleaded to be re¬ 
leased on the ground that she simply could not 
do it. The elder woman replied, “ Child, why 
do you inhibit yourself? ” Most of us inhibit 
ourselves. We harbor fears and doubts, unbe¬ 
liefs and uncertainties; and these things cripple 
us. There was Peter in the precincts of the high 
priest’s house, trying to look inconspicuous, 
cowering before suspicious eyes, and finally col¬ 
lapsing into a disgraceful denial of his Lord. In 
that dark moment Peter was inhibited by fear. 
But a few weeks later, confronted not by maids 
and lackeys but by the great ones of the earth, 
he is standing his ground, a gentleman unafraid. 
From which we may gather that the Spirit had 
released Peter from his inhibitions. 

But clearly, this was not all. The effect of the 
Spirit was not merely the negative one of remov¬ 
ing inhibitions but the positive one of enhancing 
Peter’s natural powers. The gift of the Spirit 
has sometimes been spoken of as though it were 

3 1 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


a sort of magical addition to a man’s natural 
force and capacity, something imposed upon him 
from without that gave him a superhuman 
quality. But Peter was never more than the very 
human person that he had always been. But it 
is quite evident that there had been a very ex¬ 
tensive reinforcement of his natural powers. To 
this matter we shall have to return at a later 
stage; and we need not therefore dwell upon it 
further here. It is enough now to observe that 
we find men transcending themselves, outstrip¬ 
ping their best powers, assuming the form and 
character of supermen by reason of an experience 
which they attributed to the Holy Spirit. 

7 

The Gift of Grace 

The coming of the Spirit had very conspicu¬ 
ous ethical results. I have already spoken of the 
new intensity of fellowship which followed the 
experience among those to whom it came. But we 
may well pause a little to look at it more closely. 
“ And the multitude of them that believed were of 
32 


PENTECOST 


one heart and soul; and not one of them said that 
aught of the things which he had possessed was 
his own, but they had all things in common. And 
great grace was among them all. For neither 
was there among them any that lacked; for as 
many as were possessors of lands or houses sold 
them and brought the prices of the things that 
were sold and laid them at the apostles’ feet; and 
distribution was made unto each, according as 
anyone had need.” 

The keyword here is the word grace. It is of 
course not used in its full theological sense. It is 
to be taken as signifying a prevailing gracious¬ 
ness in the mutual relationships of the primitive 
Christian community. There is a figure used of 
the coming of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost 
which might well stand for the impression that 
the early chapters of Acts make on us as a whole: 
“ the rushing of a mighty wind.” We are look¬ 
ing upon a company of people charged with an 
irresistible energy, a flaming courage, producing 
conviction of sin in their neighbours and alarm 
in the authorities. That is the impression they 
made upon the outer world. But among them- 

33 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


selves, the word which describes their temper is 
this word grace , which suggests a serene, beauti¬ 
ful and generous atmosphere. But it was not 
atmosphere only. It discharged itself in definite 
action; “ for neither was there any among them 
that lacked.” 

It has long been the fashion to speak of the 
communism of the early church; but this has no 
kind of affinity with the communism of which we 
hear so much today. Communism as we know it 
is the doctrine — and in Russia the practice — 
of the forcible expropriation of property and its 
administration by the state. But there is noth¬ 
ing of that kind in this story. Nor is there any¬ 
thing in the story that suggests that any kind of 
communism is an economic faith or practice 
obligatory on all Christians. We are not under 
law but under grace. Whether any form of com¬ 
munism is right or wrong, practicable or im¬ 
practicable, does not come up for discussion: for 
the question is not raised here. 

What the story tells us is how men will regard 
their property and how they will dispose of it 
when they have had the experience which the 
34 


PENTECOST 


apostolic company had had. And so far as prop¬ 
erty is concerned the matter can be put in a nut¬ 
shell: when men have received the Holy Spirit, 
they cease to regard their property as their own, 
to be used for their own private ends; they con¬ 
ceive that they hold it in trust for their fellows 
and part with it willingly to meet their fellows’ 
needs. 

What happened in the early church was 
something quite simple. There was no theory or 
doctrine about it. These men and women had 
passed through a great experience which had set 
them beside themselves. Their life was full of 
rapture and ecstasy. It is a commonplace of ex¬ 
perience that the coming of a great joy releases 
a wave of good will towards men. And these 
simple early Christians, so far from supposing 
that they had discovered a new economic philos¬ 
ophy, were simply flooded with a spirit of 
brotherhood and fellowship; and they did the 
natural thing under the circumstances. Those 
who had anything shared with those who had 
nothing; and they did not suppose that there was 
any virtue in it. It was all in the day’s work. 

35 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


Great grace was upon them all; and they did 
these generous and brotherly things, because they 
could not help it. The distinction, however, of 
this particular episode lies in the thoroughness 
and the completeness of the sharing. The prop¬ 
erty of one became outright the property of all. 

Nor was this all. The grace did actually work 
a sort of miracle. These things could not have 
been done had there not been people to whom they 
could be done, and who were willing that they 
should be done to them. It needs grace to give 
rightly; but it needs more grace to be able to re¬ 
ceive without shame. What we have here is that 
astonishing kind of fellowship in which receiving 
is as much a joy as giving, where accepting a gift is 
the very seal of fellowship. In our normal condi¬ 
tion of pride and self-sufficiency, we cannot 
accept gifts without a sense of humiliation, 
whatever our need. We boast ourselves of a 
spurious, even a poisonous, independence. But 
the Christian ideal is of a brotherhood in which 
“ give ” and “ take ” are equally acts of grace, 
where the receiving is a kind of giving, and the 
giving a kind of receiving. And such a brother- 


PENTECOST 


hood was achieved once in this world—the 
brotherhood that followed Pentecost. 

If one singles out this circumstance as the 
most significant result of Pentecost, it is, I think, 
for a sufficient reason. The immediate experi¬ 
ence of power and ecstasy, which forms the most 
spectacular element in the event, is not suitable 
for the daily fare of human nature. As Jesus 
plainly implied to Peter, the Mount of Trans¬ 
figuration is a good place to visit, but not a good 
place to inhabit. Flesh and blood cannot long 
stand the tension of superlative ecstasy without 
injury. At the best, the exaltation of Pentecost 
can only be an occasional experience. 

But the fellowship of the early Christians is 
another matter. It was a manifestation of what 
should be a normal ethical state. To be sure, 
even the fellowship was of a quality and an in¬ 
tensity not easy to retain in ordinary circum¬ 
stances. But none the less, it did once for all 
establish the grace of fellowship as an abiding 
principle of the Christian life. This indeed is 
only another way of affirming the sovereignty of 
love. The word love has suffered much from base 

37 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


usage and sentimental abuse, and we do not com¬ 
monly realise how huge and heroic a thing it is 
in the New Testament. St. Paul himself had a 
profound understanding of the unique signifi¬ 
cance of love in the Christian life; and, as we 
have seen, his great panegyric of love emerged 
out of a discussion of the occasional and abnor¬ 
mal manifestations of spiritual life. 

It is not perhaps impertinent to suggest that 
there is abiding need to emphasize the preemi¬ 
nence of the ethical outcome of the spiritual life 
even in its most exalted state. It is natural that 
like Peter we should want to build tabernacles in 
these high places. But there are humdrum times 
ahead. After we have shed the eagle’s wings, we 
shall have to walk; and what shall we have to go 
on with through the pedestrian days? 

Those who have passed through the experi¬ 
ence of a religious revival know that these are 
not idle questions. The crowds, the waves of 
emotion, the enthusiasm, the excitement — we 
are familiar with the outward and visible signs 
of revivalism, and I say no more about them than 
that they are there. But I suspect that St. Paul 


PENTECOST 


would have asked us at the end: Do the folk 
love each other any better than they did? Souls 
have been saved, you say; and that is good. But 
pray tell me; is there less pride, less vanity, less 
uncharitableness, more patience, more sympathy, 
more brotherhood in the community? How 
much ordinary, simple, unassuming love came 
out of the affair? This is the rule for normal 
times; this is the primary fruit of the Spirit. 

8 

After Eighteen Years 

That persecution defeats itself is a common¬ 
place of history; and there is no more notable 
instance of it than in the early diffusion of the 
gospel. After the martyrdom of Stephen, the 
general body of Christians in Jerusalem were 
scattered. But the traditional stupidity of the 
official and professional mind disabled the San¬ 
hedrim authorities from seeing that it was a very 
dangerous thing to disperse these violent and im¬ 
passioned men and allow them to carry their 
dangerous doctrines afield. The actual effect of 

39 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


the persecution on the individual was to stiffen 
his resolution and to fan his zeal. In conse¬ 
quence, there was a rapid diffusion of the Chris¬ 
tian message. By one means or another, the 
gospel was within a very short time carried as 
far northward as Damascus, Syria, and Cilicia; 
westward to the Mediterranean coast from Gaza 
to Antioch, perhaps beyond to Cyprus. How far 
eastward, we do not know; but we may confi¬ 
dently conclude that the news went southward 
to Abyssinia. 

Nor was the distribution merely geographical. 
Whether it be the artifice of the compiler of the 
story or not, it is at least interesting to observe 
the progressive character of the movement in re¬ 
lation to the religious standing of those who heard 
and accepted it. The first converts were He¬ 
brews; the next were Hellenistic Jews, then 
comes Nicolaus, a proselyte of the sanctuary. 
Next we hear of the conversion of Samaritans, 
and shortly after of the Ethiopean. So far, this 
movement is still within the circle of the circum¬ 
cision. But presently we find the “ Godfearers,” 
the proselytes of the gate, coming in; and finally 
40 


PENTECOST 


the Gentiles. It is as though the thrust of the new 
movement were carrying it on step by step, dis¬ 
entangling itself from its Judaic mother’s apron 
strings until it finds itself at last, foot-loose and 
free upon the threshold of the Gentile world. 

But wheresoever it went, the Holy Spirit is 
reported to have been active. In all, the Spirit 
is spoken of twenty-five times in the first thirteen 
chapters of the Book of Acts. It figures as the 
presiding and directing power of the proceedings. 
The leaders, Peter and the apostles, Stephen, Saul 
and Barnabas are said to have been filled with or 
to be full of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit com¬ 
mands and directs; it separates Paul and Barna¬ 
bas to the Gentile mission. It gives power and 
comfort; men received, or were baptized with or 
were anointed with the Holy Spirit. The Jews re¬ 
sisted the Spirit; Ananias lied to it; and the Spirit 
fell upon men; and was poured out upon the Gen¬ 
tiles. This is the language which the historian 
uses; and it is clear that it is language that could 
not be used save only as those who used it believed 
that they were speaking of a personal power in 
their midst. 


4i 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


Before we conclude this brief summary of 
Pentecost and its immediate sequels, we should 
do well to compare the beginning and the end of 
the period under review, to compare Jerusalem 
and Antioch. 

The two outstanding features of the Jeru¬ 
salem company after Pentecost were its propa¬ 
gandist fervor and its intense consciousness of 
solidarity. Now it happens that the disciples 
were first called Christians in Antioch. The 
name was probably first given in derision; but 
be that as it may, the coming of the name indi¬ 
cated that the world had become aware of a new 
phenomenon in its midst, which had a character 
of its own and required a name for itself. The 
church had evidently been recognized in Antioch 
as a unique body, having its own definite per¬ 
sonality and for which a fresh classification had 
to be invented. 

In Jerusalem, it is more than probable that 
the apostles themselves thought of themselves 
only as a movement within the circle of Judaism, 
as it were, a new synagogue; and it was mainly 
under the stress of persecution that they come to 
42 


PENTECOST 


recognize the incongruity of their faith and testi¬ 
mony with the prevailing orthodoxy. But in 
Antioch, where the strain and stress had largely 
subsided, the outward world looked upon these 
people and recognized that they saw a new thing 
for which a label had to be devised. Wherein 
then did the distinction of the Christian society 
in Antioch lie? 

There are two things which lend us a clue. 
First, the first Christians to arrive in Antioch 
came during the persecution following the death 
of Stephen, and they, in accordance with the pre¬ 
vailing idea, preached the gospel only to Jews. 
But a second wave came, including some Hellen¬ 
istic Jews, who were ordinarily of a more liberal 
temper than their Hebrew fellow-believers; and 
they began to preach the gospel to the Greeks. 
The Greeks were familiar with the Jews and 
knew that they kept their religion to themselves. 
They never engaged in active proselytization, 
though a Gentile seeker might under some cir¬ 
cumstances come into the outer circle of the 
covenant. But here were Jews who went out to 
make converts — a new kind of Jew who was 

43 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


also manifestly frowned upon by the Jews with 
whom the city was familiar — Jews who were 
anxious to share their faith with the Greek. 

In Antioch the Christian society retained the 
propagandist fervor of the original company in 
Jerusalem. And the crowning evidence of this 
evangelizing zeal lies in the separation — as we 
are told, at the call of the Holy Spirit — of Paul 
and Barnabas to a general mission to the Gentile 
world. Look on it as you will, it is an astonishing 
thing that this little company of believers in 
Antioch, probably composed, as all such com¬ 
panies were, of humble folk — not many noble, 
not many mighty, not many wise being attracted 
to them — should have looked out upon the Gen¬ 
tile world with desiring eyes and have dreamed 
the heroic dream of making of it a Kingdom of 
Christ, and then with a naive daring should have 
sent out two men to make their dream come true. 
Here was courage more than comparable with 
the courage of the apostles at Pentecost. 

Then that quality of fellowship which marked 
the company of the apostolic church emerges at 
Antioch in a remarkable form. Tidings had 
44 


PENTECOST 


reached Antioch of the distress among their fel¬ 
low-believers in Jerusalem consequent upon a 
severe famine. Whereupon the Antioch Chris¬ 
tians made what nowadays we should call an 
“ every-member canvass,” and each gave accord¬ 
ing to his ability to a relief fund. The bond of 
Christian fellowship was not an affair of physical 
contiguity or of felicitious speech; it was a living 
thing that discharged itself in concrete acts of 
brotherhood. The Christian society in Antioch 
stood in the spiritual succession of Pentecost. 

Now, if we assume that the Crucifixion took 
place in a.d. 29 and that Paul and Barnabas re¬ 
turned from their famine relief journey to Jeru¬ 
salem in a.d. 47 — a famine in Judea is recorded 
by Josephus as reaching its height in a.d. 46 — 
the period which is covered by the story from 
Pentecost to the commission of Paul and Bar¬ 
nabas is eighteen years. It is worth some reflec- \/ 
tion that the impulse which was quickened at 
Pentecost, so far from being exhausted, is found, 
after eighteen years, seeking new worlds to con¬ 
quer. The outlook has been widened, the propa¬ 
gandist zeal and the courage are unabated, and 

45 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


the ethical quality of the community is unmis¬ 
takable. 

A religious uprising which seems to have run 
an undiminished course for a space of eighteen 
years, and at the end of that time is entering 
upon a period of wide expansion, could not have 
found its origin in an illusory experience or a 
temporary excitement. The people most pro¬ 
foundly involved in this remarkable episode 
attributed it to the coming of the Holy Spirit. 
Their Scriptures had told them of a Spirit who 
brooded over chaos and gave it form, who in¬ 
spired their prophets, who was in some sense the 
agent of God in his more conspicuous and notable 
dealings with men. It was therefore natural and 
reasonable to trace the great thing that happened 
to them to the operations of this same Spirit. 


46 


PART II 


The Spirit at Large 





* 






















I 


The Spirit of Emergence 



hen the Spirit came upon the disciples 
in the Upper Room a new thing was 
born into the world. It was a crea¬ 
tive moment. It was not indeed recognized at 
the time that the new thing was as novel as it 
actually was. Here was a company of people 
who shared a common experience and a common 
loyalty. Superficially, one looking at them would 
have predicted that as the years passed by and 
memory paled, the company would disintegrate 
and disappear, as many such companies have 
done. But instead of that, something happened 
that turned this timid, apprehensive yet expect¬ 
ant group of men and women into a solid church 
with a flaming gospel — and their spiritual de¬ 
scendants are to be found today in great numbers 
in all parts of the world. It is not hyperbole to 
describe that event as creative. 

That convenient word “ emergent ” itself 
emerges just here. In the biological sense, an 

49 




THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


emergent is a new thing that comes into being 
in the course of the evolutionary process. In 
it are gathered up all its antecedents; but it is 
not merely the sum of its antecedents. Over 
and above these, there is now added a new em¬ 
pirical quality which gives the whole a character 
different from any or all of its antecedents. 
And when we consider the transformation of the 
company of disciples on the day of Pentecost, it 
is difficult to reject the notion that here we have 
a spiritual analogy with a natural “ emergent.” 

This doctrine of “ emergents ” seems to fit 
the pertinent facts of nature so adequately that 
it seems to be on the way to general acceptance. 
But so far no sufficient explanation of the phe¬ 
nomenon of emergence upon purely naturalistic 
grounds has been forthcoming. Dr. Whitehead 
speaks of God as a “ principle of concretion,” 
which seems to offer a clue. The antecedents 
are “ concreted ” into a new event — a state¬ 
ment which, incidentally, fits the happening at 
Pentecost very admirably — and the agent of 
this operation is God. Another scientist has 
spoken of “ a special divine influx ” as the proper 
50 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


and perhaps the only possible explanation of 
emergence. 

It has been pointed out that in Miocene 
times, at the time when the human family was 
beginning to fork off from the simian, there 
was a great increase in the size of the brain in 
many mammals; and it seems probable that an¬ 
cestral humanoid stock “ mutated ” suddenly 
in the direction of a larger and more complex 
brain. But why these things happened we do 
not know; nor have we any knowledge of the 
factors that led to the emergence of conscious¬ 
ness, or of perception and reflection. But that 
there have been such step-like advances in the 
evolutionary processes appears to admit of little 
doubt. 

In like manner, art in the shape of cave- 
drawings seems to emerge suddenly and without 
warning — and appears in its most perfect form 
in the earliest stage. That, as Mr. Chesterton 
has suggested, is the real debut of man as we 
know him. It is plain that in all emergence 
something out of the common happens and it re¬ 
quires an explanation which is not yet available. 

5i 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


This raises the question whether that in¬ 
fluence or active principle which the apostles 
call the Spirit may not be operative outside the 
specifically religious sphere, on different levels 
indeed, but with comparable results. We will 
not prejudice our inquiry at this point by assum¬ 
ing anything about the Spirit; and if we continue 
to use the term, it is without for the moment im¬ 
porting into it any idea which our examination 
of the Pentecost narrative may have suggested. 
That there is at work in the world an influence 
which may be described as creative wherever it 
operates, which is capable of reinforcing life and 
enhancing natural faculty and of producing 
characteristic effects in the intellectual, aes¬ 
thetic and ethical fields — for this there is im¬ 
pressive evidence. 


2 

The Spirit of Discovery 

In his book, Science and Method, Henri 
Poincare, the French mathematician, has a 
chapter on mathematical discovery in which he 
52 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


relates certain personal experiences. I venture 
to quote from it a passage which is full of tech¬ 
nicalities, but which in its main intention is in¬ 
telligible enough for my present purpose. Here 
it is: 

“ For a fortnight, I had been attempting to 
prove that there could not be any function anal¬ 
ogous to what I have since called the Fuschian 
functions. I was at that time very ignorant. 
Every day I sat down at my table and spent an 
hour or two trying a great number of combina¬ 
tions and arrived at no result. One night, I took 
some black coffee, contrary to my custom, and 
was unable to sleep. A host of ideas kept surg¬ 
ing in my head. I could almost feel them jostling 
one another, until two of them coalesced to form 
a stable combination. When morning came I 
had established the existence of one class of 
Fuschian functions, those that are derived from 
the hypergeometric series. I had only to verify 
the results which only took a few hours. 

“ Then I wished to represent these functions 
by the quotient of two series. The idea was per¬ 
fectly conscious and deliberate. I was guided by 

53 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


the analogy with elliptical functions. I asked 
myself what must be the properties of these 
series, if they existed, and I succeeded without 
difficulty in forming the series that I have called 
the Theta-Fuschian. 

“ At this moment, I left Caen, where I was 
then living, to take part in a geological con¬ 
ference arranged by the School of Mines. The 
incidents of the journey made me forget my 
mathematical work. When we arrived at Cou- 
tances, we got into a break to go for a drive, and 
just as I put my foot on the step, the idea came 
to me, though nothing in my former thoughts 
seems to have prepared me for it, that the trans¬ 
formations I had used to define Fuschian func¬ 
tions were identical with those of non-Euclidian 
geometry. I made no verification and had no 
time to do so, since I took up the conversation 
again as soon as I had sat down in the break; 
but I felt absolute certainty at once. When I got 
back to Caen, I verified the result at my leisure 
to satisfy my conscience. 

“ Then I began to study arithmetical ques¬ 
tions without any great apparent result and with- 
54 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


out suspecting that they could have the least 
connection with my previous researches. Dis¬ 
gusted at my want of success, I went away to 
spend a few days at the seaside and thought of 
entirely different things. One day, as I was walk¬ 
ing on the cliff, the idea came to me again with 
the same characteristics of conciseness, sudden¬ 
ness and immediate certainty, that arithmetical 
transformations of indefinite ternary quadratic 
forms are identical with those of non-Euclidian 
geometry. 

“ Returning to Caen, I reflected on this result 
and deduced its consequences. The example of 
quadratic forms showed me that there are Fus- 
chian groups other than those which correspond 
with the hypergeometric series. I saw that I 
could apply to them the theory of the Theta- 
Fuschian series, and that, consequently, there 
are Fuschian functions other than those which 
are derived from the hypergeometric series, the 
only ones that I knew up to that time. Naturally 
I proposed to form all these functions. I laid 
siege to them systematically, and captured all 
the outworks one after the other. There was one 


55 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


however that still held out, whose fall would carry 
with it that of the central fortress. But all my 
efforts were of no avail at first, except to make 
me better understand the difficulty, which was 
already something. All this work was perfectly 
conscious. 

“ Thereupon I left for Mount Valerian, where 
I had to serve my term in the army, and my mind 
was preoccupied by very different matters. One 
day as I was crossing the street, the solution of 
the difficulty which had brought me to a stand¬ 
still came to me all at once. I did not try to 
fathom it immediately and it was only after my 
service was finished I returned to the question. 
I had all the elements and had only to assemble 
and arrange them. Accordingly I composed my 
definitive treatise at a sitting and without any 
difficulty. 

“ It is useless to multiply examples and I will 
content myself with this one alone. As regards 
my other researches, the accounts I should give 
would be exactly similar.” 

Now the mathematics of this passage does 
not concern us: but the mathematician does. It 
56 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


is worth observing just here that mathematics is 
supremely the one study in which the outsider 
supposes that results are achieved by a process 
of reasoning that is altogether rigid and exact 
and admits of no chance elements. But here is a 
mathematician who bears frank witness that at 
critical junctures in his investigation, the re¬ 
quired light emerged unbidden to his mind at odd 
and irrelevant times and places. Evidently the 
study of mathematics in its highest branches is 
not a reign of law, but is liable to unexpected and 
unpredictable invasions from the “ unknown.” 

Poincare’s explanation of these happenings 
is the conventional psychological one. He sum¬ 
mons up the subconscious to account for them. 
But the subconscious is itself a hypothesis, and 
in consequence an object of faith. It is assumed 
upon grounds precisely analogous to those on 
which some of us assume the existence of God. 
But the “ unconscious ” implies another doubt¬ 
ful hypothesis — the walled-city view of per¬ 
sonality. It is assumed that the gestations of 
the mathematical discoveries which Poincare de¬ 
scribes in his narrative, went on in some dark 

57 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


pit within his own personality, which had a con¬ 
tact with his mind but with nothing else. 

We are quite obviously in a region of 
guesswork. There is no invincible reason why 
we should regard personality as an isolated, 
closed-in system; and consequently it is open to 
us to inquire whether it is not at least as 
rational an explanation of Poincare’s discoveries 
or illuminations to say that that entity once 
memorably called “ the Spirit of Truth ” had 
something to do with them. It may be that what 
we call the subconscious is no other than the 
underlying continuum of all life of which we and 
our minds are concrete embodiments and from 
which our minds are not disconnected. 

For it is to be observed that Poincare’s ex¬ 
perience shows that whatever influence was at 
work, it was an intelligent and cooperative in¬ 
fluence. This may be quite true of the “ subcon¬ 
scious,” if there be such a thing. But what are 
we to make of evidences of intelligence in life at 
levels in which the actual forms of life themselves 
presumably have neither consciousness nor in¬ 
telligence. 

5$ 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


To take the instance nearest to my hand at 
the moment, I quote from Samuel Butler’s Life 
and Habit: “ There is no man in the whole world 
who knows consciously or articulately as much 
as a half-hatched hen’s egg knows unconsciously. 
Surely the egg in its own way must know quite 
as much as a chicken does. We say of the chicken 
that it knows how to run about as soon as it is 
hatched. So it does; but had it the knowledge 
before it was hatched? What made it lay the 
foundation of those limbs which should enable 
it to run about? What made it grow a horny tip 
to its bill before it was hatched, so that it might 
peck all round the larger end of the egg and make 
a hole for itself to get out at? Having once got 
outside the eggshell, the chicken throws away 
this horny tip, but is it reasonable to suppose 
that it would have grown it at all unless it had 
known that it would want something with which 
to break the eggshell? ” 

Now I am not going to discuss what Samuel 
Butler meant by “ knowing.” I wish to point out 
only the plain evidence of unconscious intelli¬ 
gence when there is no higher level of conscious 

59 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


intelligence to set it in motion. The chicken 
somehow divined the problem of escaping from 
the egg and found a solution for it. If this is not 
evidence of intelligence, it is difficult to see what 
constitutes such evidence. The chicken some¬ 
how made a discovery as real as Poincare’s. 
Poincare is at pains to show that his own con¬ 
scious self had little if anything to do with his 
discoveries; it is certain that the chicken had 
very little to do with its discovery. It would ap¬ 
pear therefore that there is some intelligent force 
making for discovery at work in the world at 
more levels than one, which, however, we can de¬ 
tect only at second hand, that is, through its 
operations. If it be objected that Poincare and 
the chicken constitute too slender a ground for 
this generalization, the answer is that other in¬ 
stances might be plentifully supplied. 


3 

The Spirit of Ecstasy 

Every preacher has at some time or another 
had the experience of struggling with a refractory 
60 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


sermon; and then when he has reached the 
eleventh hour and is on the verge of despair, he 
sits down at his desk and to his surprise finds the 
sermon almost writing itself. He knows that 
when a sermon has been composed under those 
conditions, he will probably hear of it again, after 
he has preached it. It commonly happens that 
such sermons prove to be unusual “ means of 
grace.” I suppose that the only way to describe 
this experience is by the term “ inspiration.” It 
may take other forms. Perhaps I may be al¬ 
lowed to relate one or two personal experiences. 

Many years ago, I was under promise to 
preach on a Sunday afternoon in a little church 
in the highlands of my own county of Merioneth 
in North Wales. From my morning engagement, 
I had to go a long distance on foot; and as the 
country was new to me at that time, I looked for¬ 
ward to my walk with some little excitement, not 
alone on account of the reputed grandeur of the 
scenery, but also because my way took me near 
to the place where once lived Colonel John Jones, 
a son-in-law of Oliver Cromwell, and a signatory 
of the death warrant of Charles I. 


61 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


As I went along the rough hill road, my mind 
was much occupied with these matters; and I 
gave the sermon I intended to preach hardly any 
thought at all — as in fact I proposed to repeat 
the morning sermon. When I got into the pulpit, 
I was rather hot and tired; and it promised to be 
a drowsy afternoon. I took my text in due order, 
and then after a sentence or two, I left the 
original trail and preached an entirely different 
and quite unprepared sermon. To myself, as I 
preached it, it seemed a rather remarkable ser¬ 
mon; and there was certainly no drowsiness in 
the congregation. My mind was working with 
unusual clarity and precision; and my diction 
was impeccable — a somewhat unusual circum¬ 
stance for me, as my public diction in Welsh has 
never been particularly good. 

Later in the day, as soon as I found a little 
privacy, I tried to recover the sermon and put it 
down on paper. But the attempt was an almost 
complete failure. Nor was my own impression 
of the character of the sermon unsupported by 
other evidence on the part of those who heard it. 

One Easter morning, I was sitting in my pul- 
62 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


pit, just before preaching to a large congregation. 
Quite suddenly I became aware that I should not 
preach the sermon I had prepared; and I rose to 
my feet with only one thing in my mind — the 
story of R. W. Dale of Birmingham who one 
Easter morning was suddenly surprised by a new¬ 
born conviction that Jesus Christ was alive, and 
walked up and down his study saying to himself 
as it were in an ecstasy of discovery, “ He is alive, 
He is alive.” I told the story; and the experi¬ 
ence I have already recounted was repeated. 
There was the clarity and precision of mind, the 
same ease and fitness of diction. 

George Russell (7E) in an account of a mys¬ 
tical condition describes my own experience on 
both occasions. “ Our faculties readjust them¬ 
selves and do the work we will them to do. 
Never did they do their work so well. The dark 
caverns of the brain begin to grow luminous. We 
are creating our own light. . . . How quick the 
mind is now! How vivid is the imagination! ” 
In both cases, I still have a vivid remembrance 
of the sheer delight I had in the preaching. 

Now it is not the preacher only to whom this 

^3 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


kind of experience comes. It happens to the 
writer and to the artist, to every man whose vo¬ 
cation is one of creative self-utterance. And it 
may be asserted with some assurance that their 
highest and most characteristic utterances come 
out of experiences of this kind. 

Mr. A. E. Housman, the poet of The Shrop¬ 
shire Lady in the preface to his only other volume, 
Last Poems , writes, “ I publish these poems, few 
though they are, because it is not likely that I 
shall ever be impelled to write much more. I can 
no longer expect to be revisited by the continu¬ 
ous excitement under which in the early months 
of 1895 I wrote the greater part of my other 
book; nor indeed could I well sustain it.” The 
word excitement is a somewhat modest account 
of the experience, considering how little of any 
value comes out of most excitements. But it is 
evidently a word which commends itself to those 
who have gone through an experience similar to 
Mr. Housman’s. 

The late C. E. Montague speaks of “ the au¬ 
thentic excitement from which great art arises 
and in a letter comments upon the power of this 
64 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


excitement to make men so transcend themselves 
that the contrast between the personality of the 
man and the exaltation of his work is sometimes 
disconcerting: “ Goldsmith is a specially good 
case; but anybody ought to understand it who 
has had the common experience of meeting a 
famous author or artist (when he is not excited 
above himself by functioning in his art) and 
feeling let down by his relative dullness in talk. 
Was it Johnson who called some great actress an 
‘ inspired idiot/ for the same reason? I fancy 
every writer, when he reads something that he 
wrote with the proper excitement on him, thinks: 
‘ How did I ever do anything so good as that? ’ 
Didn’t Thackeray say something of the sort 
afterwards when he read his scene between Lord 
Steyne, Becky and Rawdon? ” 

Mr. Arthur Machen makes the same point 
at another angle: “ If ecstasy be present, then I 
say there is fine literature. If it be absent, then 
in spite of all the cleverness, all the talents, all 
the workmanship and observation and dexterity, 
then, I think, we have a product (possibly a very 
interesting one) which is not fine literature. Of 

65 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


course you will allow me to contradict myself or 
rather to amplify myself. . . . I said my answer 
was the word ecstasy. I still say so, but I may 
remark that I have chosen this word as the repre¬ 
sentative of many; substitute if you like rapture, 
beauty, adoration, wonder, awe, mystery, sense 
of the unknown, desire for the unknown. All and 
each will convey what I mean; for some particular 
case one term may be more appropriate than 
another; but in every case there will be that with¬ 
drawal from the common life and the common 
consciousness which justifies my choice of ‘ec¬ 
stasy ’ as the best symbol of my meaning. I 
claim then that here we have the touchstone 
which will infallibly separate the higher from the 
lower in literature, which will range the innu¬ 
merable company of books in two great divisions, 
which can be applied with equal justice to a 
Greek drama, an eighteenth century novelist and 
a modern poet, to an epic in twelve books and to 
a lyric in twelve lines.” 

Magnin, a French critic, bears a similar wit¬ 
ness: “I do not think there is a single man so 
deprived of imagination as not to have felt, at 
66 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


least once in his life, that superexcitation of the 
intelligence, that momentary vertigo of the heart 
and thought which I call the poetic state” 

The Abbe Bremond, from whose excellent 
and charming book, Prayer and Poetry, the last 
quotation has been taken, in that same book 
works out a close analogy between the poetic 
state and the mystical state. The upshot of his 
discussion is that poetry is arrested prayer, 
prayer that falls short of its mark: a We said 
with Pere de Grandmaison that poetic activity 
was a profane, natural sort of preliminary sketch 
of mystical activity, profane and natural, surely 
— we have just repeated it; but what is more, 
confused, clumsy, full of holes and blanks, so that 
in the last resort the poetic is but an evanescent 
mystic whose mysticism breaks down.” M. Bre¬ 
mond begs the poets not to be angry and explains 
that their breakdown arises from the very nature 
of things. The mystic is not concerned with self- 
expression ; his aim is knowledge of the real; and 
the more of that knowledge he has, the less is he 
capable of telling it. Whereas the vocation of 
the poet is to tell; and this is also his handicap. 

67 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


For in the telling he has to use words; and how¬ 
ever magically he uses them, he misses the mark. 

For myself, I cannot profess enthusiasm for 
the completely incommunicable mystical state. 
I sympathize rather with the poet’s eagerness to 
speak and to share his vision. And if I were to 
make any religious comparison with the poet, I 
should call for the prophet. Here you have, as 
in Isaiah or Amos, an inspiration which is justly 
comparable with the poet’s — save only in its 
terrific assurance. The prophet is in a state of 
excitement and transcends himself in his utter¬ 
ance, as the poet does. He speaks, as the au¬ 
thentic poet sings, because he must. His dis¬ 
tinction lies in the confidence that he speaks to 
men with a sort of ultimate authority. Thus saith 
the Lord! He is more completely beside himself 
than the poet. He is literally in an ecstasy, 
standing outside himself; and he is moved by a 
constraint so invincible that he attributes it to 
God. The prophet is concerned with righteous¬ 
ness where the poet is concerned for beauty. And 
there is no reason that I can see for declining to 
attribute the inspiration of both to the same 
68 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


source — the only difference being that the 
prophet is probably nearer the source. And for 
my part, I would as readily trace to the same 
source the inspiration that led M. Poincare to 
his mathematical discoveries. However we are 
ultimately to describe this source of inspiration, 
excitement, ecstasy, call it what you will, its 
scope embraces the good, the beautiful and the 
true, the three broad aspects under which the 
Real presents itself to us. 

4 

The Spirit of Revelation 

A few years ago, Sir James Barrie delivered 
at St. Andrew’s University a rectorial address in 
which he had much to say of a certain McCon- 
nachie: “ McConnachie, I should explain, is the 
name which I give to the unruly half of me, the 
writing half. ... I am the half of myself that 
is dour and practical and canny. He is the fanci¬ 
ful half. My desire is to be the family solicitor 
standing firm on my hearth-rug among the harsh 
realities of the office furniture, while he prefers 

69 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


to fly around on one wing. I shouldn’t mind him 
doing that, but he drags me with him.” A little 
later on, he tells us that it is McConnachie who 
writes the plays. 

We know our Barrie; and we have discovered 
that often when his touch is lightest his thought 
is apt to be deepest. “ McConnachie ” is Barrie’s 
way of telling us that there is more in us than 
meets the eye, that behind our dull and respect¬ 
able exteriors there is something that has a wing. 
Every man has his McConnachie, if he has not 
strangled him, not perhaps a McConnachie that 
sees visions and translates them into drama or 
music, but a real one, none the less. When the 
day’s work is done and you shut out the clamor 
of the street, in your own quiet, familiar cham¬ 
ber, you sometimes are aware of a faint flutter 
within, as of a broken wing. That is McCon¬ 
nachie, reminding you that he is there and try¬ 
ing to fly where he belongs. To put all this into 
prose, “ McConnachie ” is simply Barrie’s way 
of speaking of that part of our being that we call 
Aspiration. 

Another man of letters — this time, Mr. 

70 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


John Masefield — delivered a similar address in 
a Scottish university, in which he said, “ Life is 
infinitely more mysterious than anything you 
can say. You cannot probe its mystery. You^ 
know nothing about it. Then you will be filled 
with despair. Then you will turn again to your 
work. You will realize that somewhere outside 
life there come gleams and suggestions — a kind 
of butterflies and suggestions, floating into this 
world from somewhere. You make yourself the 
determination that you will follow these butter¬ 
flies of the soul and find that you come at last to 
some country that is quite close to this life of 
ours. You will be able to enter it and make it 
visible to the rest of mankind, and then you can 
go on in that faith.” 

Now we know what McConnachie is doing 
when he is flying about on his one wing. He is 
chasing what John Masefield calls “ these butter¬ 
flies of the soul.” To return to prose again — 
the butterflies of the soul are Mr. Masefield’s 
way of speaking of that fact of experience which 
we call Revelation. 

Our ordered secular knowledge is the fruit of 

7i 



THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


the labor of one part of us. We have five or so 
senses, we have intellect and reason; and our 
textbook knowledge, our science, our history, our 
anthropology and the rest are the achievement 
of this part of us — though as we have learned 
from Poincare, the “ spirit ” has something to do 
with this achievement. But it is a commonplace 
of experience that there is knowledge of another 
kind, the knowledge that McConnachie is after, 
and which, as Mr. Masefield says, comes to us 
according to no known rule but as it were 
“ butterflies floating into this world from some¬ 
where.There is knowledge which we seek and 
find; there is knowledge for which we wait and 
it comes to us. 

“ Think you amid this sum 
Of things forever speaking, 

That nothing of itself will come, 

And we must still be seeking? ” 

C. J. Romanes insists that “ reason is not the 
only attribute of man, nor is it the only faculty 
which he habitually employs for the ascertain- 
72 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 

ment of truth. Moral and spiritual faculties are 
of no less importance in their respective spheres 
even of everyday life — faith, trust, taste, et 
cetera, are as needful in ascertaining truth as 
to character, beauty, et cetera, as is reason. In¬ 
deed, we may take it that reason is concerned in 
ascertaining truth only where causation is con¬ 
cerned; the appropriate organs for its ascertain¬ 
ment where anything else is concerned belong 
to the moral and spiritual region.” The line of 
distinction is undoubtedly being drawn too 
sharply here; but the broad distinction itself is 
valid enough. There are things we find out by 
a process of inquiry; there are things that come 
to us — or so it seems to us. 

But McConnachie has to be on the wing if he 
is to catch the butterflies. An attitude of expect¬ 
ancy, of “ wise passiveness,” of receptivity, is 
generally necessary for the arrival of revelation. 
It comes to a place prepared for it. For many 
years, I was tormented by an inability to get any¬ 
thing out of instrumental music. It seemed to 
have nothing to say to me, and in spite of the use 
I made of every opportunity to listen to instru- 

73 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


mental music, I seemed to be held up before a 
permanently closed door. I was in college at the 
time, and one of my friends was an unusually 
accomplished pianist. One Sunday afternoon, I 
was with him in his lodging and he was playing 
some nocturnes of Chopin to me. I well remem¬ 
ber the unstopping of my inward ear. The music 
transported me to a woodland, and the sound of 
running water, and an amber light over the 
whole; and the moment remains vivid to this 
hour. The door was at last ajar. I don’t know 
that I am much farther in today than I was able 
to go that day. But at least music is no longer 
a dark continent to me. 

Something of the same kind happened to me 
some years after in the enjoyment of pictures. I 
have an inherited love of color, but I never could 
see in the great picture what the pundits said 
they saw in them. I read books upon the appre¬ 
ciation of art, on how to see pictures and the 
like, but in vain. I enjoyed the colors, but much 
as I enjoyed the colors of fine fabrics in shop- 
windows. But being in Paris for the first time, I 
went on the conventional pilgrimage to the pic- 
74 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


ture gallery in the Louvre, having by that time 
almost given up hope that I would ever cross the 
invisible barricade that stood between me and a 
great painting. In my wandering through the 
galleries, I was brought up sharply before a group 
of Corots; and, before many moments had 
passed some casement was opened in my mind, 
and I know that I was seeing a picture for the 
first time in my life. The canvas on the wall 
became a living thing pouring into me an un¬ 
imaginable thrill. I was almost beside myself 
with excitement. Since then, I have, I hope, 
been able to penetrate a little farther into this 
wonderland; and while I have realised that there 
are greater painters than Corot, he was the door 
by which I went in. 

How are experiences like this to be explained? 
What bridged the gulf between that picture and 
myself? The physical bridge is easily enough 
accounted for; but the spiritual or mental bridge, 
what was it? The picture was entirely new to 
me, and had no associations for me. I had seen 
other Corots before, in London, but they did not 
move me. I experienced what can only be called 

75 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


a new revelation; and the matter is full of mys¬ 
tery. How is the livingness of a great picture to 
be accounted for? By what magic does the grand 
excitement, as C. E. Montague calls it, that the 
painter transmits on to the canvas live on, and 
then have the power to communicate itself to a 
spectator after a long lapse of time? And then, 
why is it that this reflected “ excitement ” over¬ 
takes this man and passes that one by? And 
what is it that happens when the reflected excite¬ 
ment goes home? I take refuge in the language 
of Whitehead. Here were certain elements in a 
situation: I was standing before a picture; my 
mind was undoubtedly in a receptive state 
(though it had been often previously in a more 
eagerly receptive state); and then in a flash, as 
it were, something happened to me — a revela¬ 
tion, a perception, call it what you will. But 
whatever you call it, it was an event in the White- 
head sense and of a very intense kind to me. The 
various elements of the situation were “con¬ 
creted ” into a new event. And with Whitehead 
I see no other way of accounting for it than by 
saying that a principle of concretion was at work, 
76 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


and that that was God. And for my part, I would 
identify this principle of concretion with that 
presence or mode of God that we call the Spirit. 

5 

The Wind Bloweth Where 
It Listeth 

In the kind of experience with which we are 
now dealing there seems to be something that is 
fortuitous, even capricious, in its working. 
“ Art,” says Mr. George Moore, “ is not always 
with us. We know not whence it comes or 
whither it goes. The muse was with us when we 
were poor or unhappy; and when we were rich 
she deserted us. Many instances could be given, 
and against them other instances could be set in 
which the muse demanded easy and comfortable 
circumstances and refused to follow the artist 
to the garret. Nor is the muse faithful to young 
men. She visits them and leaves them helpless 
before half their lives are worn away. She comes 
to old men in their old age and inspires one work, 
and henceforth they are stranded in common- 

77 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


place. Yet there must be a law. Our pens write 
easily the word must . Why must there be a law ? 
That there is a mystery is certain, and one that 
artists ponder, the afflicted and the unafflicted 
alike.” 

We assume that there must be a law from the 
analogy of law in the physical universe. But as 
some physicists are nowadays suggesting that 
there is a principle of indeterminacy in the phys¬ 
ical universe, just as Bergson had already pointed 
out something of the same kind in the world of 
animate nature, it does not seem to be as press¬ 
ing as it once was to assume the operation of a 
law in the region which we are now discussing. 
In any case, it is worth observing that the capri¬ 
cious and the fortuitous operation of the principle 
which governs the type of experience which we 
are now passing under review is wholly in keep¬ 
ing with what we find in the sphere of religion. 
“ The wind bloweth where it listeth,” says the 
writer of the Fourth Gospel, “ thou hearest the 
sound thereof but canst not tell whence it cometh 
or whither it goeth.” And it is to be noted that 
this is written expressly as a parable of the opera- 
7 * 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


tion of the Spirit. In the Gospels, the unpredict¬ 
able character of religious events is emphasized 
more than once; they come in an hour ye know 
not! And it may be added that there is no clear 
rule that governs whom they come to or where. 

The one thing that seems clear is that these 
experiences generally come to those who are in 
some state of preparedness. Not indeed always; 
nor apparently is the preparedness conscious, 
save in rare instances. In the little town of Ket¬ 
tering in England, at the end of the eighteenth 
century there were many good and saintly men, 
some estimable ministers of religion and a num¬ 
ber of men of good education. But the great 
event of those years in Kettering went past them 
all and took place in a little cobbler’s shop. 

Why did the wind list to blow on William 
Carey? The one thing that we do know about 
Carey, apart from the fact that he was a devout 
man and a diligent searcher of the Scriptures, is 
that in his cobbler’s shop he had a map of the 
world. Not much of a map, probably, but to 
Carey it represented a Christless world. Over 
this map Carey brooded hotly. The great event 

79 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


was the coming to Carey of a vocation to preach 
the gospel to the heathen; and that event became 
the awakening of the modern missionary move¬ 
ment in evangelical Christendom. Carey was not 
in any way a man of obvious fitness for the task; 
and his religious brethren suggested as much to 
him. But the story of Carey is one of the epics of 
post-reformation times. The wind bloweth where 
it listeth; but evidently it blows with intelligence. 
The case of Carey is only one among many in 
which an unlikely man receives an evident voca¬ 
tion, and the vocation is ultimately justified by 
the man’s achievement. For all the appearance 
of fortuitousness, there appears to be some 
principle of selection. 

Further, it is well known that men are some¬ 
times visited by a religious experience which 
thrusts them forth into a position of leadership for 
a season, after which they return to the common¬ 
place. This is almost invariably the case in re¬ 
ligious revivals of the spontaneous type. The 
worked-up revivalism so familiar in modern 
times, with its big leading figure, his retinue of as¬ 
sociates and his apparatus of publicity, does not 
80 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


enter into discussion here. That is a phenome¬ 
non of modern religious life which has its origins 
in the effort to compensate for the failure of or¬ 
ganized religion to produce “ results,” and so far 
from being a case of “ the wind bloweth where it 
listeth,” it is manifestly a deliberate endeavor 
to “ raise the wind.” This is in no sense a reflec¬ 
tion upon many estimable professional evangel¬ 
ists, but their usefulness has in late years been 
gravely compromised by the blatant and some¬ 
times vulgar methods of promotion which have 
become customary in these affairs. 

But we are at the moment considering rather 
the revivals that — like the Welsh Revival at the 
beginning of this century — sprang unexpectedly 
out of local spiritual conditions and spread afield. 
In that case, the leader was manifestly greatly 
inspired for a season; and his gift thereafter 
passed away. There are other instances of the 
same kind. Besides, it may be remarked that 
these endowments of unique religious power have 
no respect of person. They have come to young 
and old, to the ignorant and the learned. But 
we are not able yet to discover whether there be 

81 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


a rule or not that governs these visitations. None 
the less, that is not to say that there is no rule, 
but that we are without the knowledge and the 
subtlety of insight that might enable us to descry 
a rule and to enunciate it. The only remark that 
can safely be made is that the wind, when it 
bloweth seems usually to choose a direction. Its 
elections appear to be made with discrimination. 
There is in general a foundation of character and 
a measure of fitness in those whom it raises to 
unique spiritual power. 


6 

The Spirit of Moral 
Reinforcement 

“ And great grace was upon them all.” It is 
not within the religious sphere only that we may 
come upon this condition. Mr. J. A. Spender in 
his volume of reminiscences, Life , Journalism and 
Politics , tells this story: A little boy of five years 
of age was run over by an automobile and seri¬ 
ously injured in front of a military hospital in 
Kent. There was no civilian hospital near; so 
82 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


the lad was taken in and a necessary operation 
had to be performed. But what next? There 
was no vacant bed in the hospital; and, besides, 
complete silence and darkness were essential to 
the patient’s recovery. “ We were all discussing 
this, when Sergeant-Major White, acting orderly, 
whose wound was nearly healed, said, ‘ Let him 
have my bed.’ There were objections; but he 
pressed hard and finally put the child in his own 
bed and insisted that he should be allowed to 
keep watch — which he did, lying beside him on 
a mattress all night. But there were twelve 
other men in the ward, and how could there be 
silence and darkness? ‘ Leave it to us,’ was the 
answer; and for three successive days and nights, 
there was hardly a light or a whisper in that 
ward; and all twelve lay in silence and darkness. 
As the story got about, other wards begged 
earnestly to be allowed to take a spell; but the 
sergeant-major and his ward absolutely refused 
to part with their patient: and with great pride 
nursed him back to life. He was a sweet child; 
and while he lay between life and death, the war 
and their wounds seemed to vanish, and day and 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


night there was only one question, 1 Would they 
pull him through? ’ ” Surely the appropriate 
comment upon this incident is, “ And great grace 
was upon them all.” 

It may be urged that this only reveals the 
latent fineness of human nature, which was re¬ 
leased by the most appealing sight in the world 
— a grievously stricken child. But that can only 
be a part of the explanation. To anyone who 
knows the normal life of a ward in a military 
hospital during the war, especially with patients 
in a state of convalescense, the self-control of 
these twelve men remains something of a miracle. 
There was evidently a release and an enhance¬ 
ment of the finest ethical qualities in these 
men which suggests that they were unusually 
reinforced. 

Indeed, the story of the war is full of in¬ 
stances of a similar kind. A British officer in a 
Territorial Battalion once said to me during the 
war: “ I knew my men for years before the war; 
and while I knew them to be on the whole very 
decent fellows, I didn’t have much ground to sup¬ 
pose that they had any really fine instincts. Out 
84 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


there at the front, they swear, they drink pretty 
heavily when they can get it: and their language 
is pretty coarse. But their chivalry, their cour¬ 
age, their endurance, their comradeship puts me 
to shame. Sometimes they look to me like 
saints.” It is not in the nature of war to produce 
fine ethical results: but there are times when it 
becomes the occasion for the display of the 
noblest qualities at their highest power. And 
you cannot put down all this merely to the strain 
and stress of the circumstances. All one can say 
is that some floodgate is opened in men in these 
conditions which permits the inflow of some grace 
that enables them to transcend their normal 
selves. To be sure, there were plenty of excep¬ 
tions; but most observers appear to agree in 
their witness to the singular fineness of the com¬ 
mon man in the war. Apparently it was among 
those who were exposed to pride of place and 
authority that the most conspicuous moral fail¬ 
ures occurred. 

My mind almost inevitably has passed at this 
point to St. Paul’s narrative of his own experi¬ 
ences: “ Of the Jews received I forty stripes save 

$5 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


one. Thrice was I beaten with rods, once was I 
stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and 
a day have been in the deep, in journeyings often, 
in perils of rivers, in perils of robbers, in perils 
from my countrymen, in perils from the Gentiles, 
in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in 
perils among false brethren, in labor and travail, 
in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fast¬ 
ings often, in cold and nakedness.” Here you 
have courage, endurance, patience, beyond the 
common measure of man. We have no difficulty 
in assuming — if we believe in a spirit of God 
abroad in the world — that in St. Paul these 
qualities are, to use his own phrase, “ the fruit 
of the Spirit.” I see no reason why we should 
not ascribe them when we find them in a common 
soldier to the same origin. Actually, we conclude 
that identical results usually follow from iden¬ 
tical causes. 

It is not necessary to labor this point. What 
is evident is that in emergencies men are enabled 
to outstrip their normal stature; and it would be 
easy to multiply instances. The annals of peace 
no less than of war are full of examples. “ By 
86 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


their fruits, ye shall know them.” And when 
we find unusual heights of moral attainment, we 
must recognize them as the fruits of a moral tree. 
For men do not gather figs of thistles. The only 
question that remains is whether the ultimate 
sources of these attainments are to be sought 
only within the compass of the individual per¬ 
sonality. 

Here I am still concerned only with unusual 
manifestations of what I have called moral rein¬ 
forcement; and once more the evidence might 
be multiplied. The martyr, the explorer, the 
pioneer, the rebel, the missionary — from all 
these classes we could draw corroboration with¬ 
out end of this phenomenon of highly enhanced 
moral qualities. 


7 

The Spirit of Conversion 

Some time ago, in a personal narrative, I read 
the following story. It was written by a man of 
mature years and recalled an experience of his 
youth. During the last term of his first year in 

*7 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


college, he was caught up into a very fast set; 
and, as he put it, there was no misdemeanor 
which he did not commit or attempt to commit. 
He neglected his work, and like the prodigal 
son, wasted his slender substance in riotous liv¬ 
ing. At that time, his parents had gone on a 
journey across the Atlantic, and on the ocean 
they had encountered a violent storm, which first 
disabled their ship and for two or three days 
tossed it about mercilessly, until the passengers 
were near despair. On their return, they heard 
rumors of the pace at which their son had been 
going; and when he returned home himself for 
the summer vacation, he had to give an account 
of himself. His mother in particular was very 
severe on him, unduly so, as he believed, and he 
was left after the inquisition in a state of 
bitterness. 

One day his father asked him to search in a 
desk drawer for some papers; and in the course 
of his search, he came across a notebook which 
he had the curiosity to open. It turned out to be 
a diary that his mother had started to keep on the 
trans-Atlantic journey and he began to read it. 

88 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


He presently came upon an unfinished account 
of the storm, and after that only one entry. That 
was a prayer in a single sentence for himself: 
“ Lord, bless and save my eldest boy.” The dis¬ 
covery immediately overwhelmed him, and after 
finding the paper his father wanted, he left the 
house and spent the day among some neighboring 
hills where he had a battle-royal with himself. 
He returned in the evening a morally changed 
man, and so he has ever since remained. 

But so far as he could tell, there was no spe¬ 
cifically religious element in his thought or his 
experience that day. He was naturally of a 
sceptical turn, and, in the relative freedom of 
college life, had taken leave of all his religious 
habits. It happened, however, on his return to 
college that fall, that he met a woman, a fellow- 
student, with whom on one occasion he fell into 
a discourse concerning religion. He found that 
the woman believed very devoutly in the efficacy 
of prayer; and in a rather flippant way, he said, 
“ Then I wish you would pray for me.” And she 
took him at his word and said, “ I will.” To his 
own great astonishment, as he was going to bed 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


that night, he felt an irresistible impulse to pray: 
and for the first time in many months he knelt 
in prayer. And according to his own testimony, 
his conversion was completed in that act of 
prayer. From that hour, life became a new 
thing. 

The records of conversion are without num¬ 
ber— and by conversion I mean that personal 
transformation which changes the whole direc¬ 
tion of a man’s life. In the case which I have 
quoted, it occurred in two parts, at two moments 
separated by many weeks. Sometimes, it has hap¬ 
pened in the twinkling of an eye; in other cases, 
it has come as gently as a summer dawn. But in 
every case, it is very difficult to explain what has 
happened without invoking the idea of some 
causal energy apart from the individual himself. 
It is easy enough to speak of it as an irruption 
from the subconscious; but that, as I have already 
observed, involves a very considerable act of 
faith; and it fails to explain the ethical conse¬ 
quences of the event. 

To be sure, there are cases of reversion, but 
are these too the results of an uprising from the 
po 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


subconscious? Is it not more rational to explain 
them through the subsidence or the withdrawal 
of the agency which in the first instance wrought 
the moral change? Whatever the agency which 
brings about conversion may be, it seems to have 
an ethical character. In the story which I have 
told, it is probable that the shock of reading his 
mother’s prayer jolted open some joint in 
his mind through which an influence of regenera¬ 
tion made its way in. And some such explana¬ 
tion as this is alone satisfactory to account 
for the conversion of say an Augustine or a 
Francis. 

Not all conversions have this pronounced 
ethical character, for the simple reason that the 
experience comes to people of sound character. 
By any ordinary standard, Saul of Tarsus was a 
good man. He was, as he tells us, as touching 
the righteousness which is in the law, found 
blameless. In his case, conversion was not the 
turning of a bad man into a good man, but of a 
legalist turned into a freeman. But with St. 
Paul’s conversion we shall have to deal more fully 
at a later point, for it provides us with the classi- 

9i 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


cal ground for the discussion of the relation of 
“ flesh ” and a spirit.” 

But let me give an instance out of my own 
experience. A young girl in a congregation of 
which I was minister once came to see me about 
her own spiritual anxieties. She was a child of 
intelligence and good breeding, and it was not 
conceivable that she should be aware of serious 
moral shortcomings. But she was very troubled 
about her relation to God. I tried to explain 
matters to her, but presently discovered that she 
thought that she had a past which hindered her 
from being right with God. Then I tried to ex¬ 
plain to her what New Testament repentance 
meant and quoted Jesus’ words “ Let the dead 
bury their dead.” I shall never forget the light 
that kindled in her eye at the hearing of those 
words; and her spirit was set free. Now we may 
describe what happened in her case as illumina¬ 
tion and perhaps realization; and the change 
that came was a change in her outlook upon life; 
and the occasion brought her great happiness. 

Mr. Havelock Ellis tells an experience of his 
own which is pertinent to this discussion. He 
£2 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


tells how after the disappearance of the faith of 
his childhood, and after science had presently 
left him with a world which, he says, “ I was pre¬ 
pared to accept, and yet a world in which, I felt, 
I could only wander restlessly, an ignorant and 
homeless child,” he came across James Hinton’s 
Life in Nature. Hinton’s view of the universe 
was “ something which not only the intellect 
might accept but the heart might cling to.” 
“ The bearing of this conception on my state of 
mind is obvious. It acted with the swiftness of 
an electric contact: the dull aching tension was 
removed; the two opposing psychic tendencies 
were fused in delicious harmony and my whole 
attitude to the universe was changed. It was 
no longer an attitude of hostility and dread, but 
of confidence and love. My self was one with the 
not-self, my will one with the universal will. I 
seemed to walk in light; my feet scarcely touched 
the ground. I had entered a new world.” Here 
too was what may justly be called illumination, 
which as in the case of the young girl evoked a 
new outlook upon life. 

What emerges is that at critical junctures in 

93 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


life, there is some principle or influence abroad 
in the world that brings a transforming deliver¬ 
ance. We use the word conversion loosely in 
these connections; but there are conversions of 
more than one kind. A divided self is unified; a 
perplexed spirit attains certainty; a bound will 
gains freedom; a restless soul finds peace; a con¬ 
trite heart is comforted — with, in every case, a 
transformed view of the world. “ The former 
things are passed away: behold, all things are 
become new.” 


8 

The Spirit of Fellowship 

It appeared, in our study of Pentecost, that 
the new fellowship of the primitive Christians 
was probably the most significant result of the 
experience. Not indeed that fellowship was a 
new thing to them; for they had it before in the 
Upper Room. They had already enough in com¬ 
mon to build upon it a living fellowship; but 
Pentecost brought to them a sense of solidarity 
and organic unity which was a new thing. 

94 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


The instinct for fellowship has its roots in the 
stuff of life; and it has been one of the main 
factors in the evolution of life. All the way and 
at every stage there has been a getting together 
which has meant much for the elaboration and 
refinement of living forms. Its importance on 
the human plane can hardly be exaggerated. 
Man is not yet by any means what he should be; 
but without his gift of fellowship he would be a 
very much poorer thing than he is. It is his gift 
of getting together with his kind that brought 
forth the things by which he is distinguished 
from the rest of the animal creation. “ In fellow¬ 
ship,” said George Meredith, “ religion hath its 
founts;” and while that is not the whole truth, 
there is much truth in it. 

But man’s capacity for fellowship taught him 
to speak and to write and helped him to acquire 
his sense of the good, the true and the beautiful. 
Without fellowship, he would have been inca¬ 
pable of philosophy, of science, of art; he could 
not have produced poets or prophets or saints. 
William Morris was not far wrong when he made 
John Ball, the mad priest of Kent, say in the 

95 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


story: “ Fellowship is heaven, lack of fellowship 
is hell. Fellowship is life; lack of fellowship is 
death. And the deeds that men do on the earth, 
it is for fellowship’s sake that ye do them: and 
the life that is in it, that shall live on and on for 
ever, and each one of you a part of it, while many 
a man’s life upon the earth, from the earth shall 
wane.” And so insistent is this instinct of fellow¬ 
ship that any pretext is enough on which to 
gather together. Here are a number of people 
interested in Charles Dickens; they find one an¬ 
other out and must needs form a Dickens fellow¬ 
ship. The thing is as natural as the growing 
of grass. 

To be sure, fellowship which was meant for 
our good may be perverted to our harm. Just as 
you may have a league of prayer, so you may 
have a fellowship of crooks. A fellowship of 
saints will make the saint saintlier; a fellowship 
of crooks will make the crook crookeder. The 
effect of fellowship is the enhancement of human 
power and faculty. Why this should be so is not 
clear; but it evidently has to do with something 
in the nature of personality. Since, however, 
pd 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


personality itself still remains a mystery, it is 
not easy to track the secret of the power of 
fellowship. 

When John Smith meets William Brown in 
the street and they begin to speak to each other, 
outwardly they seem to be two separate indi¬ 
viduals hailing each other across a gulf. But the 
gulf is not really there. The very fact that they 
understand each other’s speech involves that 
there is no gulf. Their minds meet and mingle; 
they have become for that meeting a single thing 
within which their intercourse goes on. The 
meeting has created a third fact, has brought into 
being for that occasion a microcosm, a little uni¬ 
verse, within which their minds act and interact. 

Enlarge this principle to apply to a dozen 
minds and suppose them to possess a common 
interest and to have met to promote that interest. 
Once more a new microcosm has been created in 
which a dozen minds are acting and interacting 
together. Everyone who has been engaged in a 
serious discussion under those conditions knows 
what comes out of it in the way of clearer per¬ 
ceptions, larger, bolder and more balanced 

97 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


thought, more solid conclusions. In this mutual 
interpenetration of personalities in fellowship 
there are possibilities that we have not yet 
grasped. We are still on the threshold of a won¬ 
derland of whose treasures we are only dimly 
conscious. When our knowledge of the principles 
that govern fellowship is enough to enable us to 
practice it effectually and fully we shall discover 
many things of which we have never dreamt. 
The art of fellowship is in its infancy. 

I have spoken now only of fellowship on the 
intellectual plane. But we may have fruitful and 
healthy fellowship at work and in play; and 
everybody knows how much the easy camara¬ 
derie of an idle hour can bring in the way of re¬ 
freshment. There can be fellowship at many 
levels, but on whatever level we meet, a new 
thing comes into being. A company of people 
meeting for a common purpose is more than a 
company. Something is added to them. The 
higher the level of fellowship, the more stimulat¬ 
ing and energizing is this new thing. It adds 
momentum to the search for truth; it brings 
stimulus and joy and strength to the task of 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


human service; it adds reality and assurance 
to prayer. 

It is necessary to consider this matter of the 
levels of fellowship in more detail. These levels 
are characterized by differences in the stability, 
the depth and the persistency of fellowship. In 
all fellowship there appears to be a factor sup¬ 
plementary to its actual components, namely, 
the group and the common interest. I have 
called it a microcosm within which the fellowship 
becomes articulate and active. At its best, a 
fellowship becomes something like an organism 
within which all the members act together in a 
genuine unity. There is within it a spontaneous 
coordination and cooperation. There is an 
energy of cohesion at work which cannot be ex¬ 
plained merely as the product of the native 
instinct for fellowship. 

Now the affinities by which personalities are 
linked together are still obscure to us. The un¬ 
questionable existence of the phenomena which 
we include under the word telepathy needs only 
to be mentioned to show how little we still know 
of the million means of communication that may 

99 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


exist between persons. There are high degrees 
of love and friendship which seem to involve the 
permanent mutual penetration of personalities; 
and cases of this kind have been within the obser¬ 
vation of all reflective minds. In the present 
state of our knowledge, it is idle to dogmatize in 
this region. But all we can be sure of is that 
there is a principle of mutual attraction between 
persons which makes for fellowship. 

But the paradox of human nature is that it 
contains no less a principle of self-regard which 
on slight provocation becomes a principle of 
mutual repulsion. For this reason all human 
fellowship is precarious. The individual prizes 
his own individuality and is jealous of the integ¬ 
rity of his personality; and when any association 
in which he may stand begins to invade his free¬ 
dom or to limit what he conceives to be his 
“ rights/’ he immediately falls out with it. There 
are anarchic spirits in the world who seem inca¬ 
pable of fellowship on any terms; and they go 
through life playing for their own hands. Of 
this anarchy there is more than enough in every 
one of us. The dilemma of the natural man is 


ioo 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


that he cannot do without fellowship and yet he 
cannot altogether do with it; and what fellowship 
he may create is in jeopardy every hour. 

Yet there is much stable and fruitful fellow¬ 
ship in the world. But the distinction of this 
kind of fellowship lies in the seriousness of its 
interests and in the moral quality of its aims. 
Here, by some means, the instinct of fellowship 
is reinforced against the instinct of self-regard, 
and the microcosm within which it moves ac¬ 
quires more or less stability in consequence. A 
living fellowship is more than the sum of its 
component parts; and it may be justly described 
as an emergent. 

I suggest that on these higher levels of fellow¬ 
ship, there is evidence of the operation of the 
“ Spirit.” The heavily handicapped instinct of 
fellowship is enabled to prevail against the 
stronger instinct of self-regard. It may indeed 
be that the impulse to fellowship was in the first 
instance born of the instinct of self-preserva¬ 
tion. The first “ colony ” of cells may have been 
formed for the mutual aid and defence of its 
members. But on the human plane, fellowship 


IOI 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


has shown itself capable of higher uses than that 
for which it was first intended, and indeed, if its 
origin lay in the instinct of self-preservation, the 
original purpose has long been superseded. And 
for these higher purposes, it has sometimes to be 
maintained against the impulse which gave it 
birth. For it cannot be maintained without some 
measure of self-surrender on the part of its mem¬ 
bers. But it is doubtful whether it could prevail 
against the selfish and divisive tempers of the 
natural man if it had to wage the war at its own 
charges. 

The higher the level of the fellowship — that 
is, the more serious and momentous its con¬ 
cerns— the greater is the measure of its rein¬ 
forcement and the more organic its life. I shall 
presently maintain that the most serious and 
momentous concern of man is religious aspira¬ 
tion. There is no fellowship like the fellowship 
of prayer; and no prayer like the prayer of 
fellowship. The deeper and more momentous 
are the concerns of our fellowship, the deeper 
and the more substantial does our fellowship 
become, the more intimately do we grow into 


102 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


each other, the more closely blended into each 
other. The height of fellowship is reached by 
those who seek the face of God. 

Now this is precisely what we found in the 
Upper Room before Pentecost. But Pentecost 
added something to this. We have observed the 
new and profounder unity which was reached. 
But what is evident is that the microcosm, the 
little universe of their fellowship, was realized 
in some sort as a Presence. The Spirit itself was 
present with them, presiding over them, encour¬ 
aging and strengthening them, and fusing them 
into an organism. 

This circumstance recalls a word of Jesus, 
“ Where two or three are gathered together, 
there am I in the midst of them.” It is not that 
the two’s or three’s become three’s and four’s. 
It is that they cease to be two’s and three’s and 
become a single thing, a new unity in which 
their minds and hearts work like one mind and 
heart. That one mind and heart is the heart 
and mind of Christ. That little company be¬ 
comes, as it were, the body of Christ, a body in 
and through which the living Lord himself thinks 

IOJ 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


and feels and acts. There are those who can re¬ 
call moments of spiritual fellowship so close, so 
intense, that they became aware of some tran¬ 
scendent presence laying hold of them, and sub¬ 
duing them to its own intention. Wordsworth 
felt in nature “ a presence that disturbed him 
with the joy of elevated thought.” There have 
been two’s and three’s who have felt a presence 
that semed to lift them to the threshold of the 
Holiest of All. Whether you call that presence 
the Spirit or the Living Christ is, I think, of little 
consequence. The early Christians did not in 
practice distinguish between them. St. Paul 
even identifies them: The Lord is the Spirit. 

From this experience sprang the doctrine of 
the church as the Body of Christ. Here was a 
society that was aware of itself as an organism. 
It was not an aggregate of individuals like a 
colony of cells; it was a single thing like a mul¬ 
ticellular organism. And in spite of its external 
divisions, it still retains that character. In the 
light of its own ideals, the church no doubt cuts 
a poor figure in the world. But the miracle of 
the church is that it still is in the world and that 
104 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


it has a seemingly endless capacity for renewal. 
The fellowship of the disciples became an abid¬ 
ing and a self-propagating fact in history. 

Not long ago a Finnish intellectual and rebel 
lay in a hospital dying. He had been very hard 
on the church. But one day the Archbishop 
Sergius of Finland heard of his condition and 
visited him. He was greatly moved, and this is 
what he wrote afterwards: “ From this I real¬ 
ized how much warmer the church is than 
merely worldly people en masse. Sincerer, 
heartier, more placable, more forgiving. And 
I threw myself on the church, the church, the 
warm, the last warm place on earth. What 
would the earth be like without the church? It 
would suddenly lose its meaning and grow cold.” 
For all its faults the church still preserves some¬ 
thing of the grace of Pentecost, which can only 
mean that despite its faults, the Spirit of Pente¬ 
cost still abides in it. 

It is, however, undoubtedly true that the 
church has failed in recent times to offer to men 
that measure and quality of fellowship which 
their human nature calls for; and the remarkable 

105 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


growth of “ service ” clubs in our day is due to 
a large extent to the need of compensation for 
the failure of the church in this respect. That 
a good deal of cant is sometimes spoken about 
“ service,” and that the clubs show a tendency 
to call attention to themselves and to pat them¬ 
selves on the back may be true. But there is 
no doubt that they provide the occasion of a 
fellowship which is not forthcoming elsewhere 
and that for this fellowship there is a professedly 
ethical basis. 

In the same fashion, there have come into 
being from time to time secret or quasi-secret 
societies for purposes of benevolence and mutual 
aid, and many of these have shown a persistency 
of life and activity which proves that the fellow¬ 
ship is deep rooted and powerful. It is notorious 
that groups and coteries which have existed for 
unethical purposes are extremely loose and 
perishable. It may be that there is “ honor 
among thieves but for the most part it is 
honor dictated by the instinct of self-preserva¬ 
tion. The stability of any society or brother¬ 
hood depends mainly upon an ethical quality in 
106 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


the bond of association and therefore presumably 
in the members themselves. And in the measure 
that there is a moral content in this fellowship, 
the fellowship is reinforced and confirmed by an 
influence which overcomes the divisive tempers 
which are always present in human nature and 
which on slight provocation disrupt the most in¬ 
timate bonds of association. It is not easy other¬ 
wise to account for the persistency and the long 
survival of many voluntary human associations. 

9 

The “ Holy ” Spirit 
It is time that we began to gather up this 
somewhat wayward discussion. We have been 
for the most part engaged in quoting and com¬ 
menting upon unusual and occasional experiences 
— not by any means isolated experiences, for 
they represent types of experience. They are 
however experiences which seem to be governed 
by no discernible law. They are not universal; 
they are to all appearances unpredictable; and 
they come and go without any semblance of 

loy 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


rhyme or reason. Yet they happen in every part 
of life. We have indeed had some reason to 
think that the influence which we have called the 
Spirit acts in a cooperative and discriminating 
fashion; but we have not at the moment suffi¬ 
cient data for saying more than that. What is 
quite evident is that there is an active principle 
at work in the living world which is accountable 
for these experiences, but the nature of which 
must still be a matter of faith. Whether you 
accept the traditional religious view of the nature 
of this power or the modern psychological ex¬ 
planation, your acceptance is a matter of faith. 

We have seen some ground for assuming 
different levels of the operation of the “ Spirit ” 
in the matter of fellowship. It has been custom¬ 
ary in the realm of religious thought to think of 
the Spirit as “ holy,” which seems to have pre¬ 
cluded its activity in the regions usually regarded 
as secular. The question arises whether we have 
not to recognize the operations of the Spirit in 
areas of life which are traditionally supposed to 
lie outside its scope. I have already, in many 
of the experiences cited in this part of the discus- 
108 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


1 


sion, implied as much, and for my own part 
I conclude that the “ Spirit ” is appropriately 
active on all levels of life where the need 
arises. 

I would frankly attribute to the Spirit the un¬ 
conscious intelligence of the unhatched chicken 
which enables it to devise ways and means of 
escape from the egg, and in every other mani¬ 
festation of the seemingly blind adaptation of 
means to ends on the lower levels of animal life. 
Indeed, when the process of biological evolution 
is regarded as a whole and its evident “ direc¬ 
tion ” is discerned, the whole astonishing story 
must remain an insoluble enigma unless we can 
assume that somewhere in relation to it a direc¬ 
tive influence has been at work. Even more 
baffling are those moments of emergence in the 
course of evolution, when new empirical qualities 
appear on the scene, unless we can postulate the 
activity of some principle that somehow knows 
what it is about. In spite of many disharmonies, 
the epic of life makes a rational story — and 
rationality in our human experience is never an 
accident. For myself, I would begin to trace the 

log 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


operations of the “ Spirit ” at the first beginnings 
of life. 

Now, the Spirit has not always found the 
medium in which it worked tractable. It has 
here and there found the material so refractory 
that it has abandoned it and pursued its course 
through another channel. There is evidence of 
a process of “ trial and error,” and the tale of life 
records many misfits and dead ends. There are 
forms of life which have been condemned to 
stagnation; and others which have “fallen,” 
that is, have drifted into degeneracy. Where 
life loses direction, then it is caught in a blind 
alley, or slips into the cesspool. And how ac¬ 
count for the loss of direction, except by the 
withdrawal of the “ Spirit ”? 

But for our present purpose, the importance 
of the activity of the “ Spirit ” begins on the 
level of mind. From the experiences which we 
passed in review, it is clear that the “ Spirit ” 
has much to do in relation to those matters which 
we commonly designate ultimate values , the 
good, the true and the beautiful. Now the very 
fact that we call these the ultimate values means 


IIO 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


that we decline to arrange them in a hierarchy. 
None the less, we do commonly ascribe the 
greatest honor to the saint; and on the whole we 
exalt the creation of beauty above the discovery 
of truth. 

There is a sound instinct in these popular 
judgments. The discovery of truth is an affair 
of handling existing facts and deducing their re¬ 
lations. Science investigates and finds out the 
facts, classifies them, seeks out the generaliza¬ 
tions under which they can most successfully 
be simplified. Philosophy still further ruminates 
upon these and other data of experience with the 
purpose of achieving a definitive view of the 
world as a whole. But we are all the time teth¬ 
ered to the past and present. Art, on the other 
hand, is bent on creation, on bringing forth new 
facts, new events. Its activity adds something 
new to the sum of human experience. Yet it 
does not normally look beyond the limits of ex¬ 
perience in time and space. However high it 
soars, it is still earth-bound. But the saint is 
honored for distinguished qualities which are 
the product of his otherworldliness. He has one 


hi 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


foot in the world and the other in the unseen. 
And his place at the head of the class is justified 
by the circumstance that while he can be a saint 
without being a scientist or an artist, yet the 
scientist cannot be a true scientist or the artist a 
true artist except he possess some of the qualities 
of the saint. 

But we have seen, as in the case of M. Poin¬ 
care, that the activity of the “ Spirit ” supple¬ 
ments that of the scientist and enables him to 
make new discoveries in the realm of truth. We 
have also seen that the “ Spirit ” stimulates aes¬ 
thetic sensibility to the point of vision or vivid 
illumination and to creative activity. We have 
also had evidence of the stimulation by the 
Spirit of high ethical passion and achievement. 

But “ goodness ” is not the main distinction 
of the saint, as I have already suggested. There 
is indeed in the world noble and fine character 
which seems to be unaccompanied by specific 
religious impulses, though, having in mind the 
innate perversity of human nature, I would 
ascribe this fineness and nobility to the opera¬ 
tions of the Spirit. But the essential quality of 
112 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


the saint is that supreme disinterestedness which 
is properly called “ godliness.” We are far too 
apt to use this fine word exclusively of the dis¬ 
play of overt and active piety, whereas its true 
connotation is of a life lived, as our fathers 
would say, for the glory of God, the mainspring 
of which lies in what may be called “ the practice 
of the presence of God.” 

As I have elsewhere pointed out, the good, 
the true and the beautiful are the characters of 
the house of life which the mind of man dreams 
of building in time and space; though there is in 
each of these an impulse which logically leads it 
beyond these frontiers. Beyond the possible 
world of goodness, truth and beauty, there is an 
undiscovered world of absolute worth. The 
saint is the man who consciously and deliberately 
sets out to discover this absolute worth. Man¬ 
kind has heard a rumor of eternity; and the 
saint is the man who has believed the report and 
sets out on the quest. 

The form which his quest takes is prayer, 
and this is human aspiration at its highest point. 
It is also the supreme expression on the human 

113 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


level of the activity of the Spirit. In no human 
behavior is it possible to trace the operation of 
the Spirit on ascending levels so clearly as it is 
in the practice of prayer. Prayer has proved it¬ 
self to be, in the course of the praying ages, 
capable of great elaboration and refinement. 
Moreover, its history begins with the history of 
mankind; and its essence throughout is the effort 
to transcend the boundaries of the actual world 
and to make contact with a superior reality. It 
would appear to be the chief and distinctive 
manifestation of the “ Spirit ” in man as opposed 
to what may be broadly called the “ flesh.” It 
would be a mistake to identify prayer exclusively 
with specific acts and forms of prayer. It is 
present in all disinterested effort; and though 
it is the tritest of pulpit commonplaces that a 
man’s whole life should be a prayer, it is never¬ 
theless the simple truth to say so. Only it should 
be added that no man’s life will long continue to 
be a prayer if he fails to cultivate the life of 
prayer. 

But we have seen that aspiration provokes 
revelation. Those swift and overwhelming per- 
114 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


ceptions of truth and visions of beauty, of which 
we have had evidence, were the reward of those 
who were seeking them. The reward came in its 
own time and in its own fashion; but it never 
came gratuitously. It fell, as it were, on pre¬ 
pared soil. Poincare’s exacting work in mathe¬ 
matics, the preacher’s struggle with his sermon, 
the cobbler’s hot brooding over his map, the 
youth’s effort to apprehend the magic of music, 
these were the prerequisites of revelation. The 
persons concerned were putting themselves in 
the way of a revelation. Prayer is another way 
of provoking a revelation; only in this case, it 
is a revelation of that world of absolute worth 
toward which it is directed, in a word, a revela¬ 
tion of God . 1 This revelation is what constitutes 
the inspiration of the prophet; and it is in this 
correlation of aspiration and revelation that we 
are to look for the secret of Jesus of Nazareth; 
for in him met the perfection of human aspiration 
and the uttermost revelation of God within the 
limits of flesh and blood. 

1 Upon this whole question of prayer and revelation I ven¬ 
ture to refer the reader to the first chapter of my book The 
Christian God. 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


Both these movements, aspiration and rev¬ 
elation, on whatever level we find them, are to 
be ascribed to the “ Spirit.” But upon the high¬ 
est level, namely that of prayer, we are con¬ 
cerned with a discovery of the unknown world of 
absolute worth. That is, we reach the region in 
which the word holy begins to assume its specific 
meaning. The sacred, as Dr. Oman has said, is 
the attribute of that which has absolute worth; 
and it evokes in us a sense of the holy. And 
since the activities of the Spirit on this level 
have to do with that which has absolute worth, 
we justly speak of the Holy Spirit. It is not 
another spirit than that which works on lower 
levels; but that at this level it is revealed in its 
true character — that is, as the Spirit of God, 
and for the Christian, the Spirit of God and the 
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Spirit is 
then the activity of God in relation to life at 
all its levels, subduing the medium in and upon 
which it works and as it does so leading life up¬ 
ward from one level to another, until at last it 
reaches the highest possible level in this world in 
the prayer of the saint and the revelation of God. 

116 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


I have used the words “ the medium in and 
upon which it works and in doing so I imply 
that the facts do not warrant us in identifying 
the Spirit with what we call the Immanence of 
God. In one sense we may say that the Spirit is 
God immanent in the world, working creatively 
within life and especially in refining and subli¬ 
mating human aspiration. But the range of 
phenomena which we have looked at requires us 
to postulate a certain transcendence in the rela¬ 
tions of the Spirit to life. Unless we are to dis¬ 
trust our own impressions entirely, we have to 
conceive our visions, our discoveries, our rein¬ 
forcements as originating in some power other 
than ourselves, certainly than our conscious 
selves, as being the work of some “ principle of 
concretion,” which acts upon life, as it were from 
without, and which functions in a somewhat 
different fashion from the Spirit which indwells 
the forms of life. 

But our difficulty here is that we are apply¬ 
ing spatial terms to the universe of mind to 
which they probably have no pertinency. But 
our minds, which cannot be conceived spatially, 

117 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


have nevertheless to operate in terms of spatial 
relations, and we are continually confronted by 
the dilemma of “ within ” and “ without ” in all 
metaphysical and theological discussion. Be¬ 
cause of the limitations within which intellectual 
activity has to be carried on, we are compelled 
to conceive of the relation of God to the world 
in the logically incompatible terms of transcen¬ 
dence and immanence, whereas it is probable 
that what we have to do with is a single sub¬ 
stantial activity — which in its bearing upon 
personality is felt and conceived as two opposite 
movements — the one from within, the other 
from without. But though the movements 
appear to be in opposite directions, the circum¬ 
stances which we have been reviewing in this 
section indicate that they are coordinate and 
coefficient movements. The Spirit works in us; 
it works upon us; and the results are to be traced 
in the illuminations, the discoveries, the creations 
and the conversions which punctuate, though 
irregularly, the course of life. 


118 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


10 

The Life of the Spirit 

In this section we have in the main considered 
those extraordinary and abnormal moments 
which break in upon the habitual flow of life, 
high moments of vision and power and ecstasy 
which come to men now and again. These were 
precisely the phenomena from which the early 
Hebrews inferred the existence of the “ Spirit.” 
But in St. Paul’s mind, the Greek influences to 
which he was subject, especially in the latter 
part of his life, seem to have induced an increas¬ 
ing emphasis upon the permanent and abiding 
gifts and graces of the Spirit. In the first section 
we noted how sober were the ecstasies into which 
St. Paul expected the Spirit-filled man to be led; 
and they were the ecstasies which should be the 
constant state of the Christian soul. 

It is well for us that our highest moments of 
spiritual experience should be occasional. Mr. 
Housman has, as we saw, recorded his own be¬ 
lief that he would not be able to sustain again 
the poetic excitement in which the poems of The 

ng 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


Shropshire Lad were composed; and there is no 
doubt that there are physical and nervous limits 
beyond which normal flesh and blood cannot sus¬ 
tain great spiritual excitement without injury. 
Moreover, as these visitations arrive according 
to no known schedule, our chief business lies 
with those operations of the Spirit which should 
be a constant factor in men’s lives. 

(a) “ The fruits of the Spirit,” says St. Paul, 
“.are love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, 
goodness, faithfulness, meekness, self-control.” 
Unless we are going to take St. Augustine’s view 
that the virtues of the pagan are no more than 
splendid sins, we must ascribe all conduct and be¬ 
havior of a high and spontaneous ethical quality 
wherever we find it to the operations of the Spirit. 

It was a commonplace among the evangelical 
Christians of a generation or two past that the 
chief office of the Holy Spirit was sanctification, 
by which was chiefly meant the ethical refinement 
of the individual; and we modern Christians 
make much less than we should of the need and 
possibility of “ growing in grace.” We have of 
late been setting up before us the steep and ex- 


120 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


acting demands of the Christian ethic and have 
found ourselves helpless in the face of them. It 
might be useful to remind ourselves that the 
Christian life is an affair of seed growing secretly; 
and that we are not likely to rise to the heights 
of the Christian ideal except by one step after 
another. It is the office of the Spirit to help our 
infirmities here as elsewhere; and, unless the tes¬ 
timony of the saints is misleading, it does. 

It is a source of great weakness that in mod¬ 
ern evangelical Christendom, the conception of 
spiritual growth — implying a corresponding 
moral growth — should have come to play so 
little part in the religious life. We have had, to 
be sure, holiness movements, conventions for the 
deepening of the spiritual life and the like; but 
these have in general been so closely associated 
with rigid orthodoxies and with private and ad 
hoc interpretations of the Scriptures that they 
have failed to justify themselves except to cer¬ 
tain types of pietistic temperament. This is a 
region which might well be explored anew, for 
there is in it a body of teaching that calls only 
for restatement in practical terms to become a 


121 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


source of steady spiritual reinforcement and 
moral growth. 

And this is indeed much needed. There has 
been of recent years a good deal of pseudo- 
psychological exploitation of the idea of 
“ power.” The ideal set before us is that fa¬ 
miliar personage of the sentimental novel, the 
“ strong, silent man,” who in business, in poli¬ 
tics, in adventure, in the detection of crime, is 
equal to every emergency, has uncanny intui¬ 
tions and is capable generally of superhuman 
feats. The modern quackery invites us to cul¬ 
tivate r< mind-power,” or “ will-power,” or what¬ 
ever the particular slogan is, so that we may be 
enabled to cut just such a dashing figure on the 
social or commercial stage. You have only to 
follow the method prescribed in the book, price 
one dollar, or in the more ambitious instances to 
attend a course of lessons at say twenty dollars. 
There is a superman itching under the skin of 
most men, and it is an attractive idea to unleash 
this superman, and cheap at the price. The 
“ method ” is guaranteed to bring us fame and 
fortune. 


122 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


Now there is some truth in all this. There 
are, as we have seen, unutilized resources of 
power in all of us; and it is unfortunate that we 
do not know how to release them. But these 
methods are in the end only variations on the 
theme of our old friend “ auto-suggestion.” 
While auto-suggestion has value within limits, it 
may become a sort of living on one’s psychical 
capital which leaves one exhausted and listless. 
Besides in the particular instances in question, 
we are invited to use auto-suggestion for purely 
self-regarding ends; and in that there is lying in 
wait for the deluded person who attempts it not 
only exhaustion but sheer mental and moral 
insolvency. 

Over against this charlatanism, it is necessary 
to set the New Testament doctrine of personal 
growth, which is growth primarily in grace — 
which as applied to men and women is the sum 
of those qualities which St. Paul designates as 
the fruits of the Spirit — and growth in power 
only for the enhancement and the practical ex¬ 
pression of these qualities. What is more, the 
apparent vogue of “ mind-power ” and the like 

123 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


quackery seems to indicate a widespread sense 
of personal inadequacy, which is, however, only 
to be rationally and healthily met by the New 
Testament view of the place of the Spirit in re¬ 
lation to life. 

(b) There is a memorable passage of St. 
Paul in which he speaks of the Spirit as the organ 
of spiritual discernment and discrimination: 
“ Now the natural man receiveth not the things 
of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness unto 
him and he cannot know them, because they are 
spiritually judged. But he that is spiritual 
judgeth all things.” It is a spirit of insight which 
is able to distinguish between the true and the 
false, the passing and the permanent—a point 
of view for the interpretation of life. In other 
words, the Spirit within us establishes a scale of 
values. Its full effect is to enable us to view the 
world as a sacrament. St. Paul tells us that it is 
one of the offices of the Spirit to reveal to us 
“ the things that are freely given to us of God.” 
But are not all things freely given to us of God? 
And is not that their very point, the last word 
about one and all of them? The flower of the 
124 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


field, the play of light in a precious stone, 
my breakfast, the music of running water, the 
street lamp are so many points of contact be¬ 
tween me and God. We never see anything 
in its whole truth until it kindles in us a thought 
of God. Yet that is precisely what we miss in 
these gifts and why we despise or misuse the 
world. 

Take money, for instance. Some men wor¬ 
ship money, others waste it. Both are missing 
the point of it. Money is neither to be worshiped 
nor wasted. It is a gift of God for rational 
human use; it is also something to worship and 
to glorify God with. A coin and a dollar bill are 
symbols of economic “ value.” But no man has 
seen economic value at any time any more than 
he has seen God. Economic “ value ” is a mys¬ 
tical thing, created by the toil of man out of the 
gift of God in nature. 

A coin is so much minted grace. A dollar bill 
is a sacramental thing, not to be handled lightly 
or irreverently or to be squandered with levity. 
A bank should be a kind of temple, and the 
banker a sort of priest, a minister of holy things. 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


There will be such a thing as a sacrament of 
banking when we admit the Spirit into our bank¬ 
ing practice; and eye hath not seen nor hath ear 
heard nor have entered into the heart of man the 
things that God hath prepared for bankers that 
love him. And for merchants that love him. We 
shall have a real world of business, and not the 
confused commercial scramble we know, when 
we have understood that all business is at last the 
business of God. Our business transactions will 
then partake of the nature of acts of worship; 
and indeed, even as it is, for a man, who calls 
himself a Christian, no business transaction is 
safe in which he does not worship God. “ The 
true scholar goes to his desk as to an altar,” and 
so should the business man go to his office and the 
doctor to his consulting room, the cook to her 
kitchen and the cobbler to his last. That is the 
spiritual conduct of life. 

It is a far cry to that kind of world; and 
meantime there is a score of ways in which the 
Spirit, if we will let it have its way with us, will 
correct our judgments of value. God knows we 
need it. Not long ago I read in a book, “ There 
126 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


is an account of a journalist who went to inter¬ 
view the Almighty. He found him interested in 
the little gardens of the poor, where they try to 
bring beauty into ugly places. There were tears 
in his eyes.” I wonder whether this little fancy 
is not a real test of spiritual insight. Does it 
make sense to you? I confess that I do not find 
it difficult to believe that God is moved by the 
little gardens of the poor, by the aspiration of 
beauty struggling with adversity. For so far as 
we can see, it was for things like that, for the 
realization of that kind of “ value,” that he 
brought this sum of things into being. The most 
precious things in his sight are the humble stu¬ 
dent, spending laborious nights and days to spell 
out some syllable of the unutterable Word, the 
penitence of a sinner, the cup of cold water in 
Christ’s name, the widow’s mite, things like these 
that never get into the headlines or for that mat¬ 
ter even into the footnotes. God in all things, 
truly, for the spiritual mind, as Francis Thomp¬ 
son said, 

“ Lo here! Lo there! Ah me, lo everywhere;” 


127 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


yet most manifestly in the succour of fallen 
sparrows, in 

“ A picket frozen on duty, 

A mother starved for her brood, 
Socrates drinking the hemlock, 

And Jesus on the rood.” 

We, in our worship of the big, the noisy, the 
spectacular, the pomp of power and the glitter 
of the passing show, need the eye-opening of the 
Spirit that shall show God nearest in the weak 
things of the world, in the nobodies and the noth¬ 
ings that have loving hearts, who grow flowers 
for Him that there may be beauty among men. 
The modern man is for the most part standing 
on his head, and his scale of values is upside 
down. He needs the Spirit of God to set him on 
his feet. 

(c) Related to this is the office of the Spirit 
in ministering to the joy of life. One of our 
great needs nowadays is to clear our minds about 
the nature of possession. There is possession 
which is to have the outward control of things; 
there is also possession which is to have inward 
128 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


enjoyment of things. Let us call the former 
ownership and the latter possession. Possession 
is not necessary to ownership. A man may own 
a great picture, but it does not follow that he 
possesses it. A poor man who cannot afford to 
buy a good picture for himself may possess a 
picture which another man owns. For he has the 
picture reproduced in his soul. It says deep and 
gladdening things to him that its owner never 
hears; and while the owner has to keep it on his 
walls, the other man may take it with him wher¬ 
ever he goes. For a picture is not a thing to be 
owned but to be enjoyed; and it is the man who 
enjoys it who possesses it. The owner of many 
things may be the possessor of none of them; in¬ 
deed, there is real danger that he who owns many 
things may come to be owned by them. Posses¬ 
sion is spiritual enjoyment. A modern novelist 
has put it in this way—“ Life is a number of 
little things intensely realised.” Contrary to the 
modern sense of the term, our “ real estate ” is in 
our minds, and that is the only real estate that, 
there is — except that this grace of spiritual 
possession makes the whole world your real 

I2Q 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


estate. Then “ all things/’ according to St. Paul, 
“ are yours.” 

What that old Welsh parson of the seven¬ 
teenth century, Thomas Traherne, tells of his 
own childhood should be in its essence true for 
all men at all times of life, and would be, were 
they but indwelt by the Spirit: 

“ All appeared new, and strange at first, in¬ 
expressibly sure and delightful and beautiful. I 
was a little stranger, which at my entrance into 
the world was surrounded and saluted with innu¬ 
merable joys. My knowledge was divine. . . . 
All things were spotless and pure and glorious; 
yea and infinitely mine and joyful and pre¬ 
cious. ... I saw all in the peace of Eden: 
Heaven and earth did sing my creator’s praises, 
and could not make more melody to Adam than 
to me. All time was eternity, and a perpetual 
Sabbath. . . . 

“ The corn was orient and immortal wheat 
which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. 
I thought it had stood from everlasting to ever¬ 
lasting. The dust and stones of the street were 
as precious as gold; the gates were at first the 
130 


THE SPIRIT AT LARGE 


end of the world. The green trees when I saw 
them first through one of the gates transported 
and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual 
beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad 
with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonder¬ 
ful things. The men! Oh, what venerable and 
reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal 
cherubim! And young men glittering and spar¬ 
kling together, and maids strange seraphic pieces 
of life and beauty. Boys and girls tumbling in 
the streets and playing were moving jewels. I 
knew not that they were born or should die. But 
all things abided eternally as they were in their 
proper places. Eternity was manifest in the 
light of the day, and something infinite behind 
everything appeared; which talked with my 
expectation and moved my desire. The city 
seemed to stand in Eden or to be built in heaven. 
The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the 
people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver 
were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair 
skins and ruddy faces. The skies were mine and 
so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the 
World was mine; and I the only spectator and 
enjoyer of it.” 131 


» 


f 


I 






PART ra 


The Spirit in Relation to 
Thought and Practice 





I 


The Spirit and God 

G he doctrine of the Trinity is tacitly— and 
sometimes overtly — acknowledged by 
reflective evangelical Christians to be 
something of an embarrassment. It has indeed 
become deeply entrenched in the orthodox Chris¬ 
tian tradition; but its survival, in spite of its 
great difficulty, must indicate that there are ele¬ 
ments of truth in it which would be lost if, on the 
one hand, we turned to a simple Deism, or, on 
the other, to a form of Pantheism. It is note¬ 
worthy that many devout evangelical thinkers 
of the liberal school see no way of escape 
in the only practical present alternative — 
Unitarianism. 

The strength of the doctrine of the Trinity 
lies partly in that it seems to preserve in a sym¬ 
bolic form the virtues of the two conceptions of 
transcendence and immanence. No doubt this re¬ 
ceives some reinforcement from the feeling — it 

135 




THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


can hardly be called a formulated view — that 
deity is a higher category of life than person¬ 
ality, and that the doctrine of the Trinity does 
again symbolically suggest that deity is in some 
sense super-personal. This seems to be the idea 
underlying Mr. Clement Webb’s suggestion that 
we should speak of Personality in God rather 
than of the Personality of God; and that since 
personality is essentially social in its nature, we 
must needs also speak of Society in God, which 
accords well enough with the notion of a trinity 
of persons so closely integrated as to coexist 
within the one divine substance. But why only 
a trinity? Why not a plurality, such as McTag- 
gart suggests — a number of persons living in the 
unity of a perfect love? 

But it cannot be pretended that these late 
apologetic interpretations of the Trinity pay 
much attention to the historical origin of the doc¬ 
trine. The leading fact that led to the formula¬ 
tion of the doctrine was that the Greek Fathers 
found on their hands three divine beings to whom 
personal attributes and activities were ascribed 
in the New Testament. There was God, whom 
136 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


Jesus had called the Father; there was Jesus 
himself regarded as the divine Logos in flesh and 
blood; and there was the Spirit. Now the dis¬ 
tinction between the risen and living Lord and 
the Spirit were not always well-defined; and on 
occasions they were actually identified. And 
there were on record also words in which Jesus 
was reported to have affirmed his identity with 
the Father. “ I and the Father are one.” Here 
then was unity and trinity. 

Now, as Professor Baillie has pointed out, the 
notion of three-ness in relation to Deity is not 
confined to Christianity. It is found in other 
religions; and in ancient literature and symbols 
it appears to have had a currency which indicates 
a very early origin. But it is impossible to tell 
how far the Greek Fathers were unconsciously 
affected by this circumstance. What is quite 
certain is that their solution of the matter was 
mainly determined by the Hellenistic cast of 
their own minds. They had certain categories to 
their hands and they solved their problem by 
casting Father, Son and Holy Spirit into these 
categories. 


137 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


But in doing so they did some violence to 
their own categories. Speaking strictly, the 
Stoic logos corresponds much more closely to the 
Spirit, as its character and office are described 
in the Scriptures, than it does to the Son. But 
the term Logos — having traveled into Chris¬ 
tianity by way of Alexandria and somewhat 
modified on its way, owing probably to Philo’s 
handling of it, had already been identified with 
the Son of God; and the Greek Fathers had to 
accept the situation as they found it. 

But the final formula which they achieved is 
really a tautology which, analyzed, turns out to 
be a logical nullity; for its two major terms are 
synonyms. They said there were three “ hy¬ 
postases ” in one “ ousia.” Now “ hypostasis ” 
and “ ousia ” really mean the same thing, and 
you may translate the formula as “ three sub¬ 
stances in one substance ” or “ three essences in 
one essence ” — which does not seem a very ex¬ 
plicit statement of the matter in hand. 

When the Latin Fathers came to work upon 
the matter, they translated the word hypostasis 
as persona , from which we draw our word person. 

138 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


This was much more definite than the Greek 
Fathers intended; but probably a good deal less 
definite than it has become in the course of time. 
For the word persona means a mask and pre¬ 
sumably was intended to convey the idea that the 
physical presence was a mask behind which the 
soul was hidden. But if the Greek Fathers had 
meant anything of that kind, they would not 
have used the word hypostasis but the word pro- 
sopon, and possibly it would have been better if 
they had done so. In its early use the latter 
word signified a man’s face, his appearance 
vis-a-vis with you. It was only later that it came 
to signify a person in anything like our modern 
sense, and even then it did not represent the 
somewhat rigidly outlined entity which we have 
conceived personality to be. 

The notion that seems uppermost in the word 
is Presence; and perhaps that word supplies the 
clue that we want. Possibly the true trinitarian 
formula should be “ three Presences in one sub¬ 
stance ” — if we want a formula at all. For that 
at any rate is the essential truth of experience 
which the Trinitarian doctrine reflects. The 

*39 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


divine Being was manifested in three character¬ 
istic “ presences ” — the transcendent Presence 
whom, unseen, we worship, the Father who is 
in heaven, the Real Other to whom we address 
our prayers — the unique Incarnate Presence in 
flesh and blood, Jesus Christ—and the active 
Presence in the world of life which is the Spirit 
and which is identified by its characteristic 
ministries of illumination, reinforcement and 
creation. 

This really brings us back to the New Testa¬ 
ment position. There is no rigidity in the rela¬ 
tions of the Father, Son and Spirit as we find 
them reflected in the New Testament; for there 
we are not greatly troubled by Hellenistic meta¬ 
physics. The writers are expounding their ex¬ 
perience in the terms that are to their hands; and 
the utmost we can say is that their experience 
seemed to indicate God in various “ presences.” 
It is not unlikely that, at bottom, the hold which 
the doctrine of the Trinity still continues to have 
upon many emancipated religious minds is that 
an undifferentiated Godhead, “ a bare and ab¬ 
stract oneness,” as Professor Baillie calls it, does 
140 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


not satisfy those requirements in the thought of 
God that our experience calls for. There must 
be in God that which corresponds to the range 
and variety of our religious experience; and 
the early church expressed its sense of this by 
speaking of the Father, the Son and the 
Spirit. 

I am not for a moment suggesting that, in this 
reinterpretation of the Trinitarian position, there 
is a completely defensible philosophical position. 
I am simply attempting to get at the living truth 
of the early Christian view of certain distinctions 
within the Godhead, and necessarily can offer no 
more than a rough approximation. That is the 
most we can ever hope for in this region, where 
from the nature of the case sharply outlined 
definitions are impossible. And it is to be re¬ 
membered that just as the Greek Fathers made 
their definition sharper than that of the New 
Testament, and the Latin Fathers made their 
definition sharper than that of the Greeks, so 
since then the definition has grown harder than 
even the Latin Fathers intended. The Trinita¬ 
rian formula as it is held by conventional ortho- 

141 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


doxy takes us a long way beyond the New 
Testament position. What we actually need at 
the moment is the elasticity of the New Testa¬ 
ment view, which really means that we need to 
recover the religious experiences which give life 
and significance to that view. 

On this view, the Spirit is the divine Presence 
at large in the world. In our survey of the ac¬ 
tivity of the Spirit we have ranged far and wide 
outside the specifically religious field, and have 
had reason to believe that the domain of the 
Spirit includes the so-called secular no less than 
the religious areas of life. This divine Presence 
we trace all the way up from the emergences in 
the course of biological evolution and the evi¬ 
dences of intelligence in forms of life which lack 
the organs of such intelligence, up at last to the 
highest aspirations of the human soul and to the 
revelations which these aspirations provoke — 
the region in which the Spirit may properly be 
designated “ holy.’’ 


142 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


2 

The Spirit and Man 

Perhaps we do less than justice to Nietzsche 
today because in our estimate of him we fasten 
too exclusively on his worship of power. But he 
did one important service — he recalled us to the 
truth that man as he is today is not the last term 
of biological evolution. He maintained that out 
of present man, “ by a favorable accumulation 
and augmentation of human powers and arrange¬ 
ments/’ it would be possible to develop 
a “ superman.” In these days, when we have 
become familiar with the doctrine of “ emer¬ 
gence,” this view is no longer startling. But 
to those who first heard it, it had the effect of 
novelty. 

Not indeed that it was novel. For St. Paul 
held a similar doctrine, though the “ superman ” 
whom he saw was of a different kind from that 
of Nietzsche. In his distinction between the 
natural and the spiritual man, St. Paul suggests 
that there is possible a higher type of manhood 
than man as the product of what we call 

143 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


“ nature.” In his table of emergents, Lloyd 
Morgan uses the word spirit to describe the next 
higher level to mind; which seems to accord with 
St. Paul’s thought of “ first the natural, then the 
spiritual.” As I have argued elsewhere, Lloyd 
Morgan’s doctrine of emergence appears to be 
inexplicable upon the basis of the pure natu¬ 
ralism which he professes and requires something 
like Whitehead’s “ principle of concretion ” to 
complete it. For Whitehead, God is this “ prin¬ 
ciple of concretion.” I would suggest that the 
spirit best expresses that “ presence ” of God 
which is the actual “ principle of concretion ” 
and accounts for the phenomenon of emergence. 
From inanimate matter to life, from life to mind 
— it is the coefficient action of the travailing 
spirit within and the “ concreting ” spirit upon 
the process that has carried the movement for¬ 
ward in its step-like advance. And if St. Paul 
and Lloyd Morgan are right in describing the 
empirical quality of the next higher level 
as spirit , then we may suggest that the ef- 
fort of “ the Spirit ” in the evolutionary move¬ 
ment of life is to bring forth a being in which it 
144 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


may completely express itself under terrestrial 
conditions. 

And indeed the Spirit may be said to have 
achieved such a being. It is not necessary here 
to recall passages in which Jesus is represented 
as being indwelt and guided by the “ Spirit ”; 
and we need not here wait to make fine theo¬ 
logical distinctions or identifications. Whether 
we speak of Jesus as the Logos or the Spirit In¬ 
carnate, it comes in effect to the same thing. 
The distinction of Jesus lies in the uniqueness 
of the divine manifestation in him. But it is to 
be remembered that that is a distinction, which, 
according to the Scriptures, he is at last to share 
with his brethren, who are “ predestined to be 
conformed to his image,” many of whom he will 
lead to glory and who will sit with him in his 
throne. He is the prototype and forerunner of 
a race of “ spiritual ” men. That indeed St. 
Paul says with some explicitness: “ The first 
man Adam became a living soul; the last Adam 
a life-giving spirit.” There is a succession of 
“ nature ” of which the archetype and origin is 
the first man; there is a plane and a succession of 

145 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


“ spirit ” of which Jesus is the supreme manifes¬ 
tation. Of that higher plane, there were fore¬ 
shadowings before him; in him it was definitely 
achieved. 

We may then with propriety describe the 
Pauline distinction of soul and spirit as describ¬ 
ing lower and higher emergent levels in the 
interior life of man. But there is another dis¬ 
tinction in this connection which seems to express 
more, namely the distinction of flesh and spirit. 
The one thing that may be stated at once and 
definitely is that the flesh is not to be identified 
with the body. Another thing that may be said 
is that the term flesh does not necessarily have 
an evil connotation. The antithesis of flesh and 
spirit is not primarily ethical, unless we include 
in our conception of moral evil everything that 
hinders the realization of the “ spiritual life.” 
In Galatians 3:3, St. Paul equates the “ works of 
the law ” with the “ flesh ” — which indicates 
that the “ flesh ” may mean well and honestly 
seek a righteousness to which, however (as St. 
Paul believed), it could not attain. Flesh is St. 
Paul’s way of speaking of a principle of life and 
146 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


conduct, the principle on which the natural man 
carries himself, whether at his best or at his 
worst. 

To be sure, St. Paul does categorically 
ascribe evil behavior to the “ flesh.” “ The 
works of the flesh are manifest, which are these, 
fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, 
sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousies, wraths, fac¬ 
tions, divisions, parties, envyings, drunkenness, 
revelings, and such like.” But equally he in¬ 
cludes under the flesh, not only the works of the 
law, but other things which do not necessarily 
call for moral condemnation. Those things 
which gave him “ confidence in the flesh,” his 
ancestry, his inheritance, his upbringing, his 
standing, his religious record, are not things 
which we should describe as evil, except only as 
they militate against the spirit by becoming 
objects of pride. 

In general, it is safe to say that the flesh 
represents the egocentric principle and conduct 
of life. In religion and ethics, it represents the 
notion that a man may be saved by his own effort 
and performance, by the good that he does, by 

147 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


keeping the law, by discharging his duty. But 
it is also the principle which expresses itself in 
base and selfish conduct, in self-indulgence, in 
vicious and anarchic behavior. In either case, 
the impulse is self-regarding; and it aims at self- 
satisfaction — in the one case in the sphere of 
religious and moral obligation, in the other case, 
in the indulgence of sense or of pride or of self¬ 
esteem. To be sure, even on the better side, 
there was always present the danger of a sinful 
pride; but it would be excessive to say that it 
was always inevitable. 

But in St. Paul’s use of the term flesh, there 
is also associated with it the idea of externality, 
with reference particularly to the means by 
which the flesh acts and the objects to which it is 
directed. In his own case, these external goods 
or instruments were of two kinds. On the one 
hand were his inheritance—his race, his blue 
blood (he was of the tribe of Benjamin), 
his family tradition. On the other hand 
were the institutions to which he gave his devo¬ 
tion— the synagogue and the law; and these 
were the things that he came to count well lost 
148 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


for Christ. By and for these things he had 
lived. 

But there are external things other than these 
and less worthy for which men may spend their 
lives. The pleasures of sense, power, fame, 
wealth are equally, perhaps more definitely 
within the universe of the “ flesh.” This ex¬ 
ternality is the note of the life of the flesh in its 
whole range. The natural man seeks his satis¬ 
factions in concrete, objective things. Not alone 
in the pleasures of sense, but even in the upper 
reaches of his life, he is dominated by the same 
bias. He looks for religious finality in concrete, 
clear-cut embodiments of truth underwritten by 
the authority of tradition. His moral standard 
is an external code. A scale of values and a rule 
of duty determined by a concrete immediacy of 
experience, traditionalism in thought and reli¬ 
gious belief, legalism in morality — these are the 
working principles of the natural man at his best. 

But let us do full justice to them. It is easy 
and cheap to sneer at creeds and codes. But they 
are in their essence the perfectly sound en¬ 
deavor to secure the values which the experience 

149 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


of men in religion and in conduct has revealed to 
be worthy of preservation. The early codes of 
law were simply systematic records of customs 
and usages which had proved useful and valu¬ 
able to the well-being of the community; and it 
was well to put them on record. They helped to 
define the ground gained by the moral conscious¬ 
ness in its effort to overcome moral anarchy and 
confusion. In the same way a creed is a record 
of religious truth in so far as men discern it at 
the time; and the creed is worth formulating in 
order to preserve the truth as it had been then 
recognised. But the danger of the creed and the 
code is that men may tend to claim for them a 
finality and an absoluteness which does not be¬ 
long to them. Then they become occasions of 
stagnation. The code is taken to represent the 
maximum of moral obligation, whereas it was at 
best a minimum. The creed is taken as a state¬ 
ment of religious truth which is binding for all 
time without addition or change. In both cases, 
what should have been a stepping-stone has 
been turned into a millstone around the neck 
of the religious mind and the moral will. 
150 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


And all growth is hindered, even if not wholly 
prevented. 

Now St. Paul’s conversion was at bottom a 
deliverance from this kind of bondage into the 
freedom of the Spirit. Henceforth for him, the 
external code was replaced by an inner principle 
of behavior. The legalist Saul becomes Paul who 
blazed new trails for the good life. This child of 
ancient orthodoxy is turned into an arch-heretic 
and the protagonist of a new insurgent faith. 
His new freedom did not lead him into any kind 
of anarchy; for the Spirit which made him free 
supplies with the freedom its necessary disci¬ 
plines. The first fruit of the Spirit, according to 
St. Paul’s own testimony, is Love. 

There is some analogy between St. Paul’s ex¬ 
perience and the recurrent uprisings of Roman¬ 
ticism against a classical tradition with which 
we meet in literature and art. But into this we 
may not enter further here than to suggest that 
the romantic revivals are also the fruit of this 
same Spirit — which, whatever else it may be, 
is not a spirit of stagnation. 

What then the Spirit does for a man when it 

I 5 I 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


emancipates him from the bondage of tradition 
and convention and institutions and habit is to 
implant in him an inner principle which is auton¬ 
omous and self-directing, by which he is enabled 
to transcend the limits of creed and code, and 
which is forever trying to outdo its own best. 
This is indeed only to say that the spirit has sup¬ 
planted the flesh and become both a free creative 
and exploring activity and a moral discipline 
within the man’s life. 

Paul’s conversion is the classic instance of 
one type of personal revolution. St. Augustine 
and St. Francis of Assisi represent other types; 
and probably the relative place of the various 
elements—ethical, intellectual and emotional 

— in the revolution varies in every case. But 
the product in each case is substantially the same 

— the only variations being those which derive 
from the temperamental inheritance of the in¬ 
dividual concerned. It is the emergence of a 
free, self-governing and self-directing individual 
who, however, in the process of revolution re¬ 
ceives a definite ethical direction. The law is 
written in his mind and heart; for the rest he 

152 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


makes his own life. Love God, as St. Augustine 
says, and do as you please. That is the freedom 
of the spiritual man. 

From this it follows that the spiritual man 
has attained to a complete individuality. He is 
himself, as the natural man cannot be. It is not 
to be supposed that the invasion of the individual 
by the Spirit supplants the individuality of the 
man. On the contrary, it accentuates and en¬ 
thrones it. The tendency of law and custom is 
towards uniformity of type, to flatten out all 
natural variations; and unless the individual is 
naturally of the rebel (or as Trotter in The In¬ 
stincts of the Herd put it, the unstable) tem¬ 
perament, he is slowly but remorselessly pressed 
into the average mould. But his emancipation 
from the bondage of law and custom gives his 
individuality an opportunity to unfold and to 
express itself, to make him his own man. 

But it does more than that for him. One 
part of his inheritance is the herd-instinct. It is 
not necessary here to enter into any discussion of 
the herd-mind, as it has been much canvassed in 
recent years; and especially in the years of the 

i53 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


war, we had a surprising revelation of its preva¬ 
lence. When the multitude considers its institu¬ 
tions or its customary technique of life imperiled, 
it is easily stampeded into a panic in which in¬ 
telligence is suspended. Passion takes the place 
of thought; and emotion passes for reflection. 
The catchword of the moment becomes the law 
and the prophets. To some extent, education is 
a corrective of the herd-mind. But we saw in the 
war years that it was no security against it. For 
there were men of education who lost their heads 
and shouted with the credulous and furious mob. 
But the Spirit does finally deliver a man from 
this unhappy entail and sets him up on his own 
independent feet. 

Of this, one important effect is that it makes 
the individual capable of the noblest fellowship. 
After all, the herd-instinct has this much value, 
that it is in a sense the raw material of fellowship. 
But in order to convert it into a true fellowship, 
the individual must be a free man. The “ natu¬ 
ral ” man is not psychologically free, he is always 
liable to answer the call of the herd; and the 
herd is moved either by fear or by appetite. 

154 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


Under the influence of the herd-instinct, a man 
is always less than a whole man. To be sure, 
there is another extreme in which the same effect 
is produced. The natural man may be “ organ¬ 
ized ” into an institution, in which he forfeits 
some measure of his freedom and his human 
wholeness. 

It is interesting to note that in nature there 
are two types of community. At the very be¬ 
ginnings of life, you have the loose colonial 
organization of cells and the multicellular or¬ 
ganism. In the one, the cells cluster together, 
still retaining their individual wholeness and able 
to withdraw from the colony and live an inde¬ 
pendent life. In the other, by being specialized 
for certain functions, the cells have lost their in¬ 
dividual wholeness and can no longer withdraw 
from the organism. The same difference repro¬ 
duces itself higher up, as between the herd and 
the hive. In the loose formation of the herd, 
individuality is preserved at the cost of unity; 
in the hive, the unity is achieved at the cost of 
individuality. There is no such thing as a whole 
bee-personality. The queen, the drones and the 

*55 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


workers are all specialized kinds of bee with 
distinct functions; and they are capable of no 
other. The ideal society is that in which neither 
individuality nor unity is sacrificed, but the full 
value of both is preserved. It will be found 
in a fellowship of free spirits bound together in 
love. That kind of society the church was meant 
to be but is not; and its failure has always been 
due to a shortage in its spiritual life. And to¬ 
day, it is torn between the hive of Romanism 
and the herds of Protestantism. We register 
then our conclusion that the freedom of the 
Spirit makes for a complete individuality and a 
perfect fellowship. 

The psychological aspects of the relation of 
the Spirit to the human person make a difficult 
question, though not necessarily more difficult 
than any other psychological problem. There 
are many unsolved problems in the region of 
human relationships; and if we cannot give a 
lucid and impregnable account of the relation of 
the Spirit to man, we are in no worse case than 
the psychologist is when he begins to discuss any 
of the experiences which were recounted in the 
156 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


second part of this book. For the greater part, 
the psychologist can offer us little more than in¬ 
telligent guess-work. 

We have already concluded that personality, 
whatever its exact nature may be, is penetrable 

— that it is not a walled and gateless city. Men 
are not like billiard balls that can only touch 
each other at a single point. We may more fitly 
describe them as circles that intersect one an¬ 
other; but then circles have circumferences. 
And it is a moot question whether persons have 
circumferences. Apparently they have centers 

— but there are phenomena which suggest that 
they have no definite periphery. The facts of 
telepathy, of mind-reading, of second-sight still 
await a satisfactory explanation. There is that 
curious circumstance, observed times without 
number, of the appearance in separate places at 
the same time of a new idea, of the strange syn¬ 
chronism of great discoveries made independ¬ 
ently by different persons— as in the discovery 
of the evolution hypothesis by Russell Wallace 
and Charles Darwin. These things seem to be, 
as we say, “ in the air,” they strike this man here 

'57 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


and that man there; and each man thinks it his 
own independent discovery. We can only sup¬ 
pose that there is a continuum of life of which 
we are all severally concretions, and that, while 
we exist separately, we are yet vitally in con¬ 
tact with the whole. Just as the invention of 
wireless revealed to us a means of sensory com¬ 
munication of which we were wholly ignorant, so 
there probably are in the mental world means 
of communication which we are unaware of — 
though we may suspect their existence — but 
which do bring us unexpected news. Personality, 
it would appear, is like Zechariah’s Jerusalem, a 
city without walls, and is open to the approaches 
of the Spirit on every side. A man may however 
build walls around himself and resist the Spirit. 

That the Spirit is chiefly communicated to 
one person through another is undoubtedly true. 
But we must not preclude the possibilities of 
direct communication or of other mediating 
agencies. Brother Lawrence’s spiritual life was 
kindled by the sight of a tree in its winter bare¬ 
ness. But the normal channels of the spiritual 
life flow from person to person—from parent 
* 5 * 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


to child, from friend to friend, from teacher to 
pupil. Some persons are specially endowed with 
this gift of communication, and not necessarily 
by deliberate or conscious effort. There are peo¬ 
ple who are spiritually radio-active, who appear 
to kindle and to reinforce life in those whom they 
touch. But there is no obvious reason why any 
man may not be radio-active in this way. If the 
Spirit has kindled its own life in him, he in his 
own measure is necessarily so. 

3 

The Spirit and the Church 

“ Know ye not,” said St. Paul to the Corin¬ 
thian church, “ that ye are a temple of God and 
that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you? ” And 
he tells the Ephesians that they were being 
“ builded together for a habitation of God in the 
Spirit.” It has already been pointed out that it 
is impossible to draw a hard and fast line between 
the living Christ and the Spirit in the New Testa¬ 
ment. In the Fourth Gospel, the Spirit appears 
quite clearly as the substitute of Christ: “ If I 

*59 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


go not away the Comforter will not come unto 
you; but if I go, I will send him unto you.” Per¬ 
haps we have in the Fourth Gospel an effort to 
clear up the ambiguity in which St. Paul had left 
the position of the living Christ and the Spirit in 
relation to the church, though it does not seem to 
have been altogether successful. But what is 
clear is that the church is regarded throughout 
the New Testament as being the habitation and 
the organ of the Spirit. In the Book of Acts, we 
have seen, the Spirit is the mind and life of the 
church. 

Now, I am not here concerned to formulate 
any doctrine of the church. But it is not possible 
to avoid observing the high view of the church 
which the New Testament consistently takes. 
It appears to be the organ of the perpetual pres¬ 
ence of Christ in the world. He is not in the 
world merely as a formless memorial sentiment, 
but as a creative and redeeming activity, in¬ 
dwelling a body. The church, says Bishop Gore, 
is the extension of the Incarnation. The eternal 
Christ who appeared in the world in a body of 
flesh in Jesus of Nazareth continues in the world 
160 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


in a body of people in the church. He is with us 
not as an atmosphere or an influence or an ideal, 
but as a Presence indwelling the church as the 
soul indwells the body. 

The difficulty with this view lies in its wide 
discrepancy from the actual aspect of the church 
at any given point in history. Admittedly, the 
church does not today cut a very impressive figure 
in the world; and its critics are not slow to fasten 
upon its faults and frailties. It is, they tell us, 
feeble, cowardly, querulous, divisive, ineffectual 
and so forth. But in all probability, it has always 
seemed to be so to its contemporaries. Nor is 
this to be wondered at. For it has always been 
constituted of the same human nature as it is 
today. It is and always has been made up of 
men and women who are at once self-assertive 
and sensitive, who hurt each other and manage 
out of the most trivial occasions to engender an 
astonishing amount of bad blood. These same 
men and women, moreover, are all more or less 
smitten with pride of mind and are obstinate in 
their own opinions, and when there is a clash of 
opinion, the church is divided against itself and 

161 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


is reducd to impotency. The marvel is that the 
church has so long survived the antisocial tem¬ 
pers and habits of its members and their endemic 
controversies. To be sure, the church has not 
been without fault: and there have been passages 
in its history so discreditable, so dark, that one 
can understand such an outburst as Voltaire’s 
Ecrasez Vinfante! But none the less, it is still 
here despite the faithlessness of its friends and 
the violence of its enemies. “ Sire,” said Theo¬ 
dore of Beza to King Henry of Navarre, “ it be¬ 
longs to the church, in the name whereof I speak, 
to receive blows rather than to give them. But 
it will please Your Majesty to remember that this 
is an anvil which has worn out many hammers.” 

The last century and a half has been one of 
the most difficult and distressing periods in the 
history of the church. It has been torn asunder 
again and again by internal dissension. Its faith 
has been assailed and unsettled by new knowl¬ 
edge. Its spirit has been invaded and choked 
by the unrelenting pressure of a surrounding 
materialism. Yet, despite these circumstances, 
this same period has seen the greatest missionary 
162 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


expansion of the church; and it has seen the 
awakening in the church of a vision of a Chris¬ 
tian social order in the world. The period is clos¬ 
ing with a strong impulse towards the reunion 
of Christendom. When, five hundred years 
hence, the church historian reviews this period, 
it will probably seem to him to have been one of 
the great heroic and adventurous epochs in the 
life of the church. This astonishing persistency 
of the church needs some explanation: and be¬ 
sides this, its seemingly infinite capacity for re¬ 
newal. The story of the church is punctuated 
with revivals and reformations. As the Puritan 
said of “ the perseverance of the saints,” the life 
of the church is an endless series of new begin¬ 
nings. At any given moment, the church cuts a 
sorry figure in the light of its own ideal; but, seen 
in due perspective, it is the most impressive 
spectacle in the world. 

The late Josiah Royce speaks of the Beloved 
Community as a community of memory and 
hope. It is, so far as it goes, a true description 
of the church. It is a community with a past; 
it has a history. It lives in the memory of high 

163 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


heroic moments. There is a cross for ever in its 
mind; there is an Upper Room built into its spir¬ 
itual fabric. There have been martyrdoms that 
have been the seed of the church. But it is also 
a community of hope. It has not only a past but 
a future, not only a history but a destiny. But 
in all this, we are looking at the church, as it 
were, on the flat, moving along the horizontal 
plane of time. But this is not the real distinction 
of the church. It shares this horizontal life with 
all human institutions. Its distinction lies in its 
vertical life. It is a community of memory and 
hope; even more it is a community of aspiration 
and revelation. 

It is a community of aspiration, a worshiping, 
praying society. Here on this plane of time, it 
tries to take eternity by storm. Here amid the 
press of visible things it seeks an invisible 
world. Here on the level of nature, it seeks to 
achieve a life of the Spirit. And here is its first 
and essential note. Probably the church never 
came nearer a true apprehension of itself as the 
body of Christ than it did in the period from say 
1170 to 1225, that period which brought forth 
164 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


among other wonders Francis of Assisi. The 
paradox of that period is that while ecclesiastical 
statecraft was making those tragic mistakes 
which finally made the Reformation inevitable, 
there was an astonishing resurgence of spiritual 
life; and one of its main manifestations was in 
the character of its architecture. Up to that 
time, the prevailing style was Norman, and its 
notes were massiveness and solidity. It was a 
noble survival of the old Roman idea of building 
for eternity, building things to last as long as 
time. But they spoke — those great Norman 
structures — of the church as an institution, 
something that stood squarely and permanently 
in the world, an abiding historical corporation. 
But then comes the change. Gothic makes its 
appearance. The peculiar quality of Gothic is 
that it makes one look upward — not back to the 
past or forward into the future, but up to heaven. 
Gothic is aspiration translated into stone. Nor¬ 
man architecture expressed the horizontal life of 
the church, Gothic its vertical life. Its peculiar 
genius is aspiration. 

But because it is a community of aspiration, 

I( $5 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


it is also a community of revelation. For these 
two things are never separate. Never an aspira¬ 
tion but provokes a revelation; never a revela¬ 
tion but provokes an aspiration. Now, the core 
of this revelation is a gospel — good news of a 
heavenly Father and a heavenly Kingdom, an 
everlasting mercy, a grace that saves to the utter¬ 
most, and a truth that makes men free — and all 
this coming with an assurance and an immediacy 
as satisfying and as living as it did to the multi¬ 
tude on the day of Pentecost. It is one of the 
reasons why the gospel is still a living thing in 
the world that there has been in the world a com¬ 
munity of aspiration which in every age has 
heard the gospel for itself, not as an echo out of 
the past but as a word from heaven. 

Naturally, because the church is a community 
of revelation, it is also a community of testimony. 
Necessity is laid upon it to pass the word along. 
The light that comes to it, it is to make to shine 
before men. The grace and truth which it re¬ 
ceives it is not to enjoy in selfish isolation but to 
share with a race in need. 

Here then is the church’s vital activity, aspi- 
166 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


ration, revelation, testimony; and it is hardly 
necessary to point out how it reproduces the 
essentials of Pentecost. The aspiration of the 
Upper Room was completed by the revelation 
and the testimony of Pentecost. Herein lies the 
true apostolic succession. The continuity of the 
life of the church has not been preserved, as is 
confidently affirmed in certain quarters, by the 
historical succession of a hieratic class. That is 
to make the church’s life to depend upon his¬ 
torical externality, and the line of succession, 
even at that, is very doubtful. The continuity 
of the church’s life through the centuries has 
come down along the broad stream of the prayers 
and the pieties of worshiping companies, a mul¬ 
titude that no man can number of common and 
anonymous folk who have kept the altar fires 
alight and handed on the testimony from genera¬ 
tion to generation. The life of the church is the 
life of the Spirit, manifesting itself in the two 
coefficient activities of Aspiration and Revela¬ 
tion, and expressing itself to the world in a con¬ 
tinual renewal of testimony; and we need no 
other principle of continuity to explain the life 

167 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


of the church than the presence of the Spirit in 
the church. 

The presence of the Spirit in the church is 
also the energy of cohesion which keeps it a com¬ 
munity, in spite of divisive tendencies latent in 
human nature, and when the community begins 
to break up, it is directly traceable to a shortage 
of spiritual life. There is a lake I know which 
in the spring shows a clean and unbroken sheet 
of water; but by the end of August, the level of 
the water has so fallen that its surface is broken 
all over by sharp points of rock. The church is 
composed of frail, angular folk, but when its 
spiritual level is high, our pride and pugnacity 
are drowned out of sight in deep waters; when 
the level falls, our sharp points and rough edges 
appear and break the peace and the fellow¬ 
ship of the church. Euodias and Syntyche would 
not have fallen out at Philippi or the Corinthian 
church have broken apart into quarreling cliques, 
if there had not been a failure of spirituality in 
those churches. 

Controversies in the church are symptoms of 
a low vitality; and when we begin to be at odds 
168 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


with one another, if we had any spiritual discern¬ 
ment, instead of fighting it out, we should begin 
to pray for the gift of the Holy Spirit. When 
men are more eager to make their own opinions 
prevail than they are for the peace and fellow¬ 
ship of the church, their trouble is not intolerance 
or dogmatism but a deficit of spiritual life — 
they have not had recent contacts with the Holy 
Spirit. 

Not only so, they are unconsciously fighting 
against the truth of God. During the crisis in 
Scotland about church union in the early years 
of this century, Dr. Alexander Whyte said a 
memorable thing: “ For the restraint of con¬ 
troversy and the reign of peace and for the life 
of love, for my part, I would willingly become 
almost all things to all men. But you will say 
to me in triumph, that truth is truth, and so it is. 
But I say also — and I more and more feel it — 
that love is love. And I have the highest au¬ 
thority for it that love is the fulfilling of the law, 
the law of truth, the law of duty and every other 
law.” He might have added that one can only 
find and speak and act the truth where there is 

169 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


love, and that there is in the spirit of controversy 
that which makes one careless of truthfulness. 

The fellowship that the church should always 
be depends upon the continued indwelling of the 
Spirit; and when, because the Spirit is not 
sought, the fellowship falls apart, then the truth 
itself is lost, and everything else that matters is 
lost. The bearing of all this upon the present 
discussions of church union is obvious. The re¬ 
union of churches is not an affair of skillful ac¬ 
commodation and compromise; it is a matter of 
raising the level of spiritual life in the churches 
until it overflows the dividing hills. 

It is worth observing how sacrosanct was the 
fellowship in the early days. The sin of Ananias 
was breach of fellowship, a double breach — for 
not only did he break the voluntary covenant of 
the mutual sharing of goods, but he also lied 
about it. And he was regarded as having lied to 
the Holy Ghost. And it is something of the same 
attitude that is reflected in St. Paul’s grim words: 
“ If any man destroyeth the temple of God, him 
shall God destroy; for the temple of God is holy, 
which temple ye are.” 
iyo 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


4 

The Church and the World 

Though the hands of the church be lifted be¬ 
yond the stars, its feet are none the less on the 
solid ground of earth. 

There is a drawing by William Blake, in 
which a very small man stands, with hands up¬ 
lifted, at the foot of a ladder which reaches from 
the earth to the moon. The inscription on the 
drawing is, “ I want, I want.” Blake meant his 
drawing to be a comment on man. He saw man 
as an incarnate want. He wants, and like the 
proverbial Irishman, does not know what he 
wants and will not be happy until he gets it. 

Many of the things he wants, he can supply 
for himself. He can go out and find food and 
clothing, shelter, light and heat, the wants of his 
bodily life. But men cannot live by bread alone. 
He has a hungry mind, and for this he must find 
other bread. So he has invented books and pic¬ 
tures, music and drama. He has taught himself 
to find sustenance in the sights and sounds of 
nature, and he has to his credit a noble and varied 

171 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


cultural achievement. But when he has eaten 
his fill of this fine, immaterial provender, he is 
still left crying “ I want, I want.” What is it 
that he wants, and how and where is he to find it? 

Through all the ages, in countless ways, the 
heart of man has been pursuing this elusive 
secret. It has had many names; and the places 
where it is supposed to be bidden have been called 
by many names, Avalon, Elysium, the Isles of 
the Blest, which lie “ beyond the pomp of setting 
suns,” and many another. The book of Job has 
a story to tell of this ancient quest: “ The deep 
saith, It is not in me, and the sea saith, It is not 
in me.” Neither was it to be found in the 
heavens, save by some path “ which no fowl 
knoweth and the falcon’s eye hath not seen.” 
And when it was asked of Destruction and Death, 
all they could say was, “We have heard a rumor 
thereof.” Francis Thompson tells of his search 
— how he sought the secret in the starry heavens, 
in human love, in the friendship of living nature, 
in the eyes of little children; but ended as he 
began, with empty hands. Men have traveled 
far on the road of knowledge; and our grand- 
772 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


fathers were sure that science would uncover the 
secret. But today science is beginning to say, 
“ It is not with me.” The road of thought, much 
and long traveled, still ends in an unanswered 
question. Man is still crying, “ I want, I want.” 

Now the church is not a select company 
marked off from a heedless and perverse race. 
It is the point at which the blind and confused 
“ I want, I want ” of mankind attains to articu¬ 
late and ordered utterance. Here the ignorant 
aspiration of humanity, its childish “ I want ” 
has been purified and refined into prayer and 
worship. The prayers of the church are not its 
own private affair: they are the spearhead of the 
unceasing but unintelligent prayer of all flesh. 
St. Peter speaks of the church as a royal priest¬ 
hood; and a priest is a kind of middleman, who 
appears for man before God. The church is the 
spokesman of all mankind, in its prayers and sup¬ 
plications making vocal the hunger and the thirst 
of a race. On behalf of all men, the church cries 
out, “ I want, I want.” It is the interpreter and 
the mouthpiece of the elemental longing of the 
heart of man. It is the world’s priest and inter- 

173 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


cessor before the throne of God. The church is 
the whole world on its knees, this restless world’s 
uplifted hand. It takes upon itself the longing, 
the shame, the sorrow of a foolish and ignorant 
world and bears it in its intercessions before the 
God of all the earth. 

But it is the claim of the church that it has 
heard the answer to the immemorial question of 
man. It is the spokesman of man before God; it 
claims to be also the mouthpiece of God in man. 
It has received, as we have seen, a revelation; 
and it is its office to declare it. If it is a royal 
priesthood, it is no less a royal prophethood. 
Over against the bleak negations of time, it utters 
the grand affirmative of eternity. Above all the 
silences, the scepticisms, the agnosticisms and 
despairs of earth, it sounds forth the everlasting 
Yes of God. 

Now the service of the church to mankind is 
not to be measured by its own increase. That 
the church should annex souls to itself is indeed 
involved in its very task. But what it does for 
the world is not to be assessed by its own statis¬ 
tical advances. Its essential and particular serv- 
*74 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


ice is simply that it keeps the soul of the world 
alive. Despite its feebleness, it still keeps flying 
in the world the banner of a saving otherworld¬ 
liness. It maintains and diffuses a spiritual view 
of life far beyond its own frontiers. It reminds 
the world that it cannot live by bread alone; 
and it keeps alive many a fair aspiration that 
would die but for the shelter that the church 
offers to it. What spiritual values the world 
recognizes, however faintly, are preserved from 
extinction by the life of the church in the world. 
Were the church to die, all those human pursuits 
which depend upon a faith in the reality of a 
spiritual universe, art, poetry, virtue, culture, 
would wane. Earl Balfour has, in a memorable 
passage in The Foundations of Belief , pointed 
out that those sceptical persons who profess to 
maintain their ethical ideals independently of re¬ 
ligious support are parasites, sheltered and up¬ 
held by convictions which belong not to them but 
to the society of which they are a part. Their 
spiritual life is maintained by processes which 
they disown. That this indifferent and faithless 
world that we know does not fall apart is due 

175 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


chiefly to that spiritual foundation upon which 
it rests, but which it does not recognize, and 
which was laid through long ages by the travail 
and patience and faith of the church of God. 

In the church is made articulate the spiritual 
hunger of the world; and through the church is 
mediated that word which cometh forth from the 
mouth of God, which is bread for the world’s 
hunger. It affirms the reality of man’s spiritual 
striving and of its goal. And so it saves the 
world from being eaten up by secularity and 
materialism. It sets up 

“ a mark of everlasting light 
Above the howling senses’ ebb and flow,” 

and keeps reminding men of an utterable spirit¬ 
ual destiny. 

The Spirit of God is in all human aspiration. 
There can, indeed, be no aspiration, however 
faint, without some measure of inspiration. The 
native thirsts and hungers of mankind for some 
invisible good are the sign of the indwelling 
Spirit; and this attains its highest level in the 
church. But there deep answers to deep; and 
176 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


aspiration is vindicated and justified by revela¬ 
tion. That is the church — it is the stage on 
which the Spirit of God brings man and God into 
touch with each other and keeps alive the life 
of the world. Without it, the world would slide 
through barbarism and animalism down to de¬ 
struction. 


5 

The Conditions of Renewal 

The church is not accomplishing its mission 
in the world in anything like the measure in 
which, on these premises, we should expect it to. 
And there is today a peculiarly urgent need that 
the church should seek renewal. The great 
missionary conference that gathered in 1929, 
in Jerusalem, after a survey of its problem, 
seems to have concluded that the challenge of 
Christianity to other religions and the resistance 
of other religions to Christianity are at the 
moment overshadowed by the menace which 
confronts all religions alike in the rising tide of 
secularity all over the world. It is not only this 

177 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


faith or that, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism 
or another, that is in jeopardy, but the religious 
view and conduct of life as a whole. Mankind 
seems to be drifting to the view that this world 
we see is all the world there is, that the unseen 
is a negligible fiction, and that the only gospel 
for men is the gospel of what with grim uncon¬ 
scious irony we call a “ good time.” I will not 
now pause to point out what the final conse¬ 
quences of a widespread secularization of life 
are bound to be. The observation which I would 
make with some confidence is that it is the busi¬ 
ness of the Christian church not merely to set 
up a barricade to stay this advancing worldli¬ 
ness, but to take the field like an army with 
banners and put it to rout. 

Unfortunately, it is today in no position to 
take the field. Its divisions, its own confusion 
of mind about its business in the world, its un¬ 
certain gospel i—these things paralyze it. A 
traveler who recently had occasion to spend a 
week-end in a city in western Canada reports 
that, upon seeking the counsel of a friend about 
a church in which he might profitably worship 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


on the Sunday evening, he was told, “ There is 
only one church in the city at which you are 
certain to hear a Christian sermon tonight.” No 
doubt, the matter was exaggerated; but even so, 
the incident reflects a grave contemporary con¬ 
dition. There is an increasing tendency to in¬ 
duce people to come to church by a policy of 
“ special features.” It is apparently assumed 
that the great matter is, by hook or crook, to fill 
the churches; and the church advertisements in 
the Saturday press reveal an immense industry 
in devising attractive baits in order to lure the 
idle and the curious into the church services. 

Within the first few months of last year 
(1929), the writer received letters from two 
young ministers whose office-bearers were press¬ 
ing on them the “ special feature ” policy. The 
churches around them were doing it, and they 
were reported to be drawing much people. But 
these two ministers rightly felt that it was a 
surrender to secularity, a lowering of the flag; 
and they wanted to be confirmed in their judg¬ 
ment. They were, of course, perfectly right. 
This tendency is a symptom of a loss of faith in 

179 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


the power of the gospel, of a real if unacknowl¬ 
edged scepticism of the worth and necessity of 
common prayer and of the hearing of the word 
of God. The stunt is the thing — that, seem¬ 
ingly, is the new doctrine. And all this in the 
face of the ominous secularization of life on 
every hand. Nor is this the only symptom of 
declining faith and power in the church. If ever 
there was a condition that called for a Pentecost, 
this is assuredly it. 

Now there have been renewals without num¬ 
ber in the history of the church; and it might 
not be amiss to look at some of them. 

The five or six centuries following the sack of 
Rome are rightly called the Dark Ages. It was 
a time of great corruption and degradation, with 
here and there a bright light that seemed only 
to accentuate the surrounding darkness. The 
first real and continuous break in that black 
night begins with the founding in a.d. 91 i of 
the monastery at Cluny, with the intention of 
promoting a return to a stricter and more faith¬ 
ful observance of the Rule of St. Benedict. The 
beginning of the redemption of Europe from the 
180 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


hell of the Dark Ages, was through a small com¬ 
pany of men who banded themselves together 
for a common life of ordered prayer. The move¬ 
ment spread with great rapidity, and it was fol¬ 
lowed not only by a revival of religious interest 
but by new beginnings in education and art. 

The Cluniac impulse ran low, after reaching 
its height about the beginning of the eleventh 
century. But towards the end of that century, 
there came another revival — and by the same 
path. Companies of men joined themselves to¬ 
gether to live an ordered life of devotion — the 
Grandmontines in 1076, the Austin Canons in 
1078, the Carthusians in 1084, culminating in a 
fresh revival of the Benedictine Rule in the 
Cistercian movement. And this revival brought 
with it an intense intellectual activity and was 
marked by a great advance in architecture. 

The second revival had not spent its force be¬ 
fore signs of still another became apparent. We 
hear of new groups of men seeking together a 
deeper, more ordered religious life — the Cru- 
ciferal in 1169, the Poor Men of Lyons in 1179, 
culminating in the Franciscan movement (1209) 

181 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


and the Dominican (1216). Once more the pro¬ 
cedure is the same. The revival came through 
the effort of small companies of men to live in 
fellowship an ordered life of devotion and 
prayer . Of this third revival, there were reper¬ 
cussions in the world of thought, science, politics 
and art; and its abiding monument is in the 
great Gothic churches which were begun at the 
time. 

After this, there was as we know a great de¬ 
cline. The church became worldly and corrupt. 
But in the fourteenth century, we see signs of 
another uprising. Small groups of devout men 
and women came together to cultivate the life 
of the Spirit . Sometimes they formed communi¬ 
ties; at other times, they lived their ordinary 
life in the world but came together regularly for 
meditation and prayer. Out of these movements 
came great things. One of these groups was 
the “ Friends of God,” among whom was John 
Tauler whose sermons deeply affected Martin 
Luther. Another was the “ Brethren of the Com¬ 
mon Life,” which included Florentius of De¬ 
venter, and through him Thomas a Kempis, who 
182 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


wrote The Imitation of Christ . It is gener¬ 
ally acknowledged that such groups as these 
paved the way to the Protestant Reformation, 
which, whatever else it may have been, was a 
great revival of spiritual religion. 

The beginnings of the Methodist revival and 
the evangelical movement of the eighteenth 
century are well known. They take us to an¬ 
other small group that met for regular prayer 
and devotion in Lincoln College, Oxford. Be¬ 
hind every general revival of spirituality, you 
will invariably find a small group or a number of 
small groups which have systematically and in 
fellowship sought the presence of God and have 
waited for his appearing. Here we have only 
given the merest epitome of the story — the 
whole tale would fill many books. But it will be 
observed that in every case, the beginning of a 
revival is true to type: and the prototype is 
Pentecost. 

The moral is obvious, though it is difficult for 
us to learn it in these days of mass movements 
and mass production. We have some kind of 
notion that religion can be “ promoted,” just as 

183 


THE SPIRIT OF GOD 


we may promote a business organization or a 
charity campaign. But we should have been 
warned against this fallacy long ago. “ The 
Kingdom of Heaven cometh not with observa¬ 
tion ”— not with publicity and noise and the 
flourish of trumpets. What we have called “ re¬ 
vivalism ” would seem to be at most points at 
extreme antipodes from the New Testament 
view of the coming of the Kingdom. Most cer¬ 
tainly, the revivals of religion that have left an 
abiding mark upon the course of religion and 
upon the life of the world have begun with a 
minimum of “ promotion.” 

What you have to begin with is a company of 
people who devoutly desire to achieve a deeper 
spiritual life, who thereupon agree to live or to 
meet together regularly, submit themselves to a 
rule of life and prayer, and continue together in 
their common quest. They are not consciously 
looking for a revival of religion at large; they 
are concerned in the first instance only with the 
revival and reinforcement of religion in them¬ 
selves. And once that has been achieved, it in¬ 
evitably spreads beyond the original company 
184 


THOUGHT AND PRACTICE 


to those with whom its members have to do. It 
becomes a contagion from soul to soul. Gen¬ 
erally, it brings forth a leader, as it brought forth 
St. Francis and John Wesley, who becomes its 
mouthpiece and interpreter. But the spring is 
the small company, which devotes itself to me¬ 
thodical and sustained prayer for the gift of the 
Spirit. 

If the church is to have a renewal of life, it 
must begin with those who profoundly desire the 
renewal of their own lives and who will make 
common cause, in companies, in seeking the gift 
of the Spirit by ordered and sustained prayer, 
and who will go on doing so until they receive 
the gift. There are many such people in the 
church today; and they should have no difficulty 
in finding one another out, and then setting out 
together to seek a baptism of the Spirit. 












































































































































































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